For an introduction, see Wikipedia - Beam Search.

• Beam search for RNNs: Rush et al 2015 - A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization This may be the first paper to use beam search in seq2seq models (as far as Jeff knows)

Invented for decoding in speech recognition, beam search was the de-facto decoding algorithm for statistical machine translation and was also used for statistical parsing. Historical references are here:

• Machine translation
  • Och et al 2003 - Statistical Phrase-Based Translation
  • Khoen 2004 - Pharaoh: a beam search decoder for phrase-based statistical machine translation models

• Decoding
• Seq2seq