Investigating Omission as a Latency Reduction Strategy in Simultaneous Speech Translation
Mana Makinae, Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro Watanabe
Abstract
Simultaneous speech translation (SiST) requires balancing translation quality and latency. While most SiST systems follow machine translation assumptions that prioritize full semantic accuracy to the source, human interpreters often omit less critical content to catch up with the speaker. This study investigates whether omission can be used to reduce latency while preserving meaning in SiST.We construct a dataset that includes omission using large language models (LLMs) and propose a Target-Duration Latency (TDL), target-based latency metric that measures the output length considering the start and end timing of translation. Our analysis shows that LLMs can omit less important words while retaining the core meaning. Furthermore, experimental results show that although standard metrics overlook the benefit of the model trained with proposed omission-involving dataset, alternative evaluation methods capture it, as omission leads to shorter outputs with acceptable quality.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.findings-ijcnlp.138
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Mumbai, India
- Editors:
- Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2238–2258
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.138/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Mana Makinae, Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, and Taro Watanabe. 2025. Investigating Omission as a Latency Reduction Strategy in Simultaneous Speech Translation. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2238–2258, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Investigating Omission as a Latency Reduction Strategy in Simultaneous Speech Translation (Makinae et al., Findings 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.138.pdf