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arXiv · 1909.05421

Speculative Beam Search for Simultaneous Translation

Renjie Zheng·Mingbo Ma·Baigong Zheng·Liang Huang
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Abstract

Beam search is universally used in full-sentence translation but its application to simultaneous translation remains non-trivial, where output words are committed on the fly. In particular, the recently proposed wait-k policy (Ma et al., 2019a) is a simple and effective method that (after an initial wait) commits one output word on receiving each input word, making beam search seemingly impossible. To address this challenge, we propose a speculative beam search algorithm that hallucinates several steps into the future in order to reach a more accurate decision, implicitly benefiting from a target language model. This makes beam search applicable for the first time to the generation of a single word in each step. Experiments over diverse language pairs show large improvements over previous work.

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Renjie Zheng, Mingbo Ma, Baigong Zheng, Liang Huang. 2019-09-12. Speculative Beam Search for Simultaneous Translation. https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05421

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