STACL: Simultaneous Translation with Implicit Anticipation and Controllable Latency using Prefix-to-Prefix Framework

Mingbo Ma; Liang Huang; Hao Xiong; Renjie Zheng; Kaibo Liu; Baigong Zheng; Chuanqiang Zhang; Zhongjun He; Hairong Liu; Xing Li; Hua Wu; Haifeng Wang

arXiv · 1810.08398

STACL: Simultaneous Translation with Implicit Anticipation and Controllable Latency using Prefix-to-Prefix Framework

Mingbo Ma·Liang Huang·Hao Xiong·Renjie Zheng·Kaibo Liu·Baigong Zheng·Chuanqiang Zhang·Zhongjun He·Hairong Liu·Xing Li·Hua Wu·Haifeng Wang

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Abstract

Simultaneous translation, which translates sentences before they are finished, is useful in many scenarios but is notoriously difficult due to word-order differences. While the conventional seq-to-seq framework is only suitable for full-sentence translation, we propose a novel prefix-to-prefix framework for simultaneous translation that implicitly learns to anticipate in a single translation model. Within this framework, we present a very simple yet surprisingly effective wait-k policy trained to generate the target sentence concurrently with the source sentence, but always k words behind. Experiments show our strategy achieves low latency and reasonable quality (compared to full-sentence translation) on 4 directions: zh<->en and de<->en.

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Mingbo Ma, Liang Huang, Hao Xiong, Renjie Zheng, Kaibo Liu, Baigong Zheng, Chuanqiang Zhang, Zhongjun He, Hairong Liu, Xing Li, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang. 2018-10-19. STACL: Simultaneous Translation with Implicit Anticipation and Controllable Latency using Prefix-to-Prefix Framework. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.08398

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