@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2026-redefining-machine,
    title = "Redefining Machine Simultaneous Interpretation: From Incremental Translation to Human-Like Strategies",
    author = "Zhang, Qianen  and
      Yang, Zeyu  and
      Nakamura, Satoshi",
    editor = "Salesky, Elizabeth  and
      Anastasopoulos, Antonios  and
      Negri, Matteo  and
      Federico, Marcello",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Spoken Language Translation ({IWSLT} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, USA (in-person and online)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/bulk-corrections-2026-07-02/2026.iwslt-1.2/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.iwslt-1.2",
    pages = "8--31",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-411-8",
    abstract = "Simultaneous Machine Translation (SiMT) requires high-quality translations under strict real-time constraints, which traditional policies with only READ/WRITE actions cannot fully address. We extend the action space of SiMT with four adaptive actions: Sentence{\_}Cut, Drop, Partial{\_}Summarization and Pronominalization, which enable real-time restructuring, omission, and simplification while preserving semantic fidelity. We adapt these actions in a large language model (LLM) framework and construct training references through action-aware prompting. To evaluate both quality and word-level monotonicity, we further develop a latency-aware TTS pipeline that maps textual outputs to speech with realistic timing. Experiments on the ACL60/60 English-Chinese, English-German and English-Japanese benchmarks show that our framework consistently improves semantic metrics and achieves lower delay compared to reference translations and salami-based baselines. Notably, combining Drop and Sentence{\_}Cut leads to consistent improvements in the balance between fluency and latency. These results demonstrate that enriching the action space of LLM-based SiMT provides a promising direction for bridging the gap between human and machine interpretation."
}