Towards Stream Translation: Adaptive Computation Time for Simultaneous Machine Translation

Felix Schneider, Alexander Waibel


Abstract
Simultaneous machine translation systems rely on a policy to schedule read and write operations in order to begin translating a source sentence before it is complete. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Adaptive Computation Time (ACT) as an adaptive, learned policy for simultaneous machine translation using the transformer model and as a more numerically stable alternative to Monotonic Infinite Lookback Attention (MILk). We achieve state-of-the-art results in terms of latency-quality tradeoffs. We also propose a method to use our model on unsegmented input, i.e. without sentence boundaries, simulating the condition of translating output from automatic speech recognition. We present first benchmark results on this task.
Anthology ID:
2020.iwslt-1.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Marcello Federico, Alex Waibel, Kevin Knight, Satoshi Nakamura, Hermann Ney, Jan Niehues, Sebastian Stüker, Dekai Wu, Joseph Mariani, Francois Yvon
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
228–236
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.iwslt-1.28
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.iwslt-1.28
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Felix Schneider and Alexander Waibel. 2020. Towards Stream Translation: Adaptive Computation Time for Simultaneous Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation, pages 228–236, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Stream Translation: Adaptive Computation Time for Simultaneous Machine Translation (Schneider & Waibel, IWSLT 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.iwslt-1.28.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929618