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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 endto-end approaches. The key idea is to use two separate, but synchronized, decoders on streaming ASR and direct speech-to-text translation (ST), respectively, and the intermediate results of ASR guide the decoding policy of (but is not fed as input to) ST. During training time, we use multitask learning to jointly learn these two tasks with a shared encoder. En-toDe and En-to-Es experiments on the MuSTC dataset demonstrate that our proposed technique achieves substantially better translation quality at similar levels of latency.
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Improving Simultaneous Translation by Incorporating Pseudo-References with Fewer Reorderings
Simultaneous translation is vastly different from full-sentence translation, in the sense that it starts translation before the source sentence ends, with only a few words delay. However, due to the lack of large-scale, high-quality simultaneous translation datasets, most such systems are still trained on conventional full-sentence bitexts. This is far from ideal for the simultaneous scenario due to the abundance of unnecessary long-distance reorderings in those bitexts. We propose a novel method that rewrites the target side of existing full-sentence corpora into simultaneous-style translation. Experiments on Zh→En and Ja→En simultaneous translation show substantial improvements (up to +2.7 BLEU) with the addition of these generated pseudo-references.
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- PAR ID:
- 10398231
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of EMNLP 2021
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 5857 to 5864
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.473
