Simultaneous Machine Translation is the task of incrementally translating an input sentence before it is fully available. Currently, simultaneous translation is carried out by translating each sentence independently of the previously translated text. More generally, Streaming MT can be understood as an extension of Simultaneous MT to the incremental translation of a continuous input text stream. In this work, a state-of-the-art simultaneous sentence-level MT system is extended to the streaming setup by leveraging the streaming history. Extensive empirical results are reported on IWSLT Translation Tasks, showing that leveraging the streaming history leads to significant quality gains. In particular, the proposed system proves to compare favorably to the best performing systems.
There has been great progress in improving streaming machine translation, a simultaneous paradigm where the system appends to a growing hypothesis as more source content becomes available. We study a related problem in which revisions to the hypothesis beyond strictly appending words are permitted. This is suitable for applications such as live captioning an audio feed. In this setting, we compare custom streaming approaches to re-translation, a straightforward strategy where each new source token triggers a distinct translation from scratch. We find re-translation to be as good or better than…
Valencian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence（瓦伦西亚人工智能研究所）；Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）
Simultaneous machine translation has recently gained traction thanks to significant quality improvements and the advent of streaming applications. Simultaneous translation systems need to find a trade-off between translation quality and response time, and with this purpose multiple latency measures have been proposed. However, latency evaluations for simultaneous translation are estimated at the sentence level, not taking into account the sequential nature of a streaming scenario. Indeed, these sentence-level latency measures are not well suited for continuous stream translation resulting in f…
Decoder-only Streaming Transformer for Simultaneous Translation
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院人工智能安全重点实验室）
Non-autoregressive Streaming Transformer for Simultaneous Translation
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Soochow University（苏州大学）
Simultaneous machine translation attempts to translate a source sentence before it is finished being spoken, with applications to translation of spoken language for live streaming and conversation. Since simultaneous systems trade quality to reduce latency, having an effective and interpretable latency metric is crucial. We introduce a variant of the recently proposed Average Lagging (AL) metric, which we call Differentiable Average Lagging (DAL). It distinguishes itself by being differentiable and internally consistent to its underlying mathematical model.
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) starts translating while receiving the streaming source inputs, and hence the source sentence is always incomplete during translating. Different from the full-sentence MT using the conventional seq-to-seq architecture, SiMT often applies prefix-to-prefix architecture, which forces each target word to only align with a partial source prefix to adapt to the incomplete source in streaming inputs. However, the source words in the front positions are always illusoryly considered more important since they appear in more prefixes, resulting in position bias, wh…
Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on speech translation tasks. However, the model architecture is not efficient enough for streaming scenarios since self-attention is computed over an entire input sequence and the computational cost grows quadratically with the length of the input sequence. Nevertheless, most of the previous work on simultaneous speech translation, the task of generating translations from partial audio input, ignores the time spent in generating the translation when analyzing the latency. With this assumption, a system may have good latency qu…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Although Transformers have gained success in several speech processing tasks like spoken language understanding (SLU) and speech translation (ST), achieving online processing while keeping competitive performance is still essential for real-world interaction. In this paper, we take the first step on streaming SLU and simultaneous ST using a blockwise streaming Transformer, which is based on contextual block processing and blockwise synchronous beam search. Furthermore, we design an automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based intermediate loss regularization for the streaming SLU task to improve t…
Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Simultaneous speech-to-text translation is widely useful in many scenarios. The conventional cascaded approach uses a pipeline of streaming ASR followed by simultaneous MT, but suffers from error propagation and extra latency. To alleviate these issues, recent efforts attempt to directly translate the source speech into target text simultaneously, but this is much harder due to the combination of two separate tasks. We instead propose a new paradigm with the advantages of both cascaded and end-to-end approaches. The key idea is to use two separate, but synchronized, decoders on streaming ASR a…
Large Language Models Are Read/Write Policy-Makers for Simultaneous Generation
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院人工智能安全重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
With the increasing importance of online communities, discussion forums, and customer reviews, Internet "trolls" have proliferated thereby making it difficult for information seekers to find relevant and correct information. In this paper, we consider the problem of detecting and identifying Internet trolls, almost all of which are human agents. Identifying a human agent among a human population presents significant challenges compared to detecting automated spam or computerized robots. To learn a troll's behavior, we use contextual anomaly detection to profile each chat user. Using clustering…
StreamSpeech: Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation with Multi-task Learning
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院人工智能安全重点实验室）；School of Future Science and Engineering, Soochow University（苏州大学未来科学与工程学院）
