Learning Coupled Policies for Simultaneous Machine Translation using Imitation Learning

Philip Arthur; Trevor Cohn; Gholamreza Haffari

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arXiv · 2002.04306

Learning Coupled Policies for Simultaneous Machine Translation using Imitation Learning

Philip Arthur·Trevor Cohn·Gholamreza Haffari

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Abstract

We present a novel approach to efficiently learn a simultaneous translation model with coupled programmer-interpreter policies. First, wepresent an algorithmic oracle to produce oracle READ/WRITE actions for training bilingual sentence-pairs using the notion of word alignments. This oracle actions are designed to capture enough information from the partial input before writing the output. Next, we perform a coupled scheduled sampling to effectively mitigate the exposure bias when learning both policies jointly with imitation learning. Experiments on six language-pairs show our method outperforms strong baselines in terms of translation quality while keeping the translation delay low.

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Philip Arthur, Trevor Cohn, Gholamreza Haffari. 2020-02-11. Learning Coupled Policies for Simultaneous Machine Translation using Imitation Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.04306

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