While the neural transducer is popular for online speech recognition, simultaneous speech translation (SST) requires both streaming and re-ordering capabilities. This paper presents the LS-Transducer-SST, a label-synchronous neural transducer for SST, which naturally possesses these two properties. The LS-Transducer-SST dynamically decides when to emit translation tokens based on an Auto-regressive Integrate-and-Fire (AIF) mechanism. A latency-controllable AIF is also proposed, which can control the quality-latency trade-off either only during decoding, or it can be used in both decoding and training. The LS-Transducer-SST can naturally utilise monolingual text-only data via its prediction network which helps alleviate the key issue of data sparsity for E2E SST. During decoding, a chunk-based incremental joint decoding technique is designed to refine and expand the search space. Experiments on the Fisher-CallHome Spanish (Es-En) and MuST-C En-De data show that the LS-Transducer-SST gives a better quality-latency trade-off than existing popular methods. For example, the LS-Transducer-SST gives a 3.1/2.9 point BLEU increase (Es-En/En-De) relative to CAAT at a similar latency and a 1.4 s reduction in average lagging latency with similar BLEU scores relative to Wait-k.
Synchronous Bidirectional Inference for Neural Sequence Generation
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, CASIA(中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室);University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学);CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology(中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心)
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, CASIA(中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室);University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学);CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology(中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心)
Future-Guided Incremental 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);Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab(华为诺亚方舟实验室)