Fixed and Adaptive Simultaneous Machine Translation Strategies Using Adapters
Abderrahmane Issam, Yusuf Can Semerci, Jan Scholtes, Gerasimos Spanakis
Abstract
Simultaneous machine translation aims at solving the task of real-time translation by starting to translate before consuming the full input, which poses challenges in terms of balancing quality and latency of the translation. The wait-k policy offers a solution by starting to translate after consuming words, where the choice of the number k directly affects the latency and quality. In applications where we seek to keep the choice over latency and quality at inference, the wait-k policy obliges us to train more than one model. In this paper, we address the challenge of building one model that can fulfil multiple latency levels and we achieve this by introducing lightweight adapter modules into the decoder. The adapters are trained to be specialized for different wait-k values and compared to other techniques they offer more flexibility to allow for reaping the benefits of parameter sharing and minimizing interference. Additionally, we show that by combining with an adaptive strategy, we can further improve the results. Experiments on two language directions show that our method outperforms or competes with other strong baselines on most latency values.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.iwslt-1.36
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2024)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand (in-person and online)
- Editors:
- Elizabeth Salesky, Marcello Federico, Marine Carpuat
- Venue:
- IWSLT
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 298–310
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.iwslt-1.36
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Abderrahmane Issam, Yusuf Can Semerci, Jan Scholtes, and Gerasimos Spanakis. 2024. Fixed and Adaptive Simultaneous Machine Translation Strategies Using Adapters. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2024), pages 298–310, Bangkok, Thailand (in-person and online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Fixed and Adaptive Simultaneous Machine Translation Strategies Using Adapters (Issam et al., IWSLT 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.iwslt-1.36.pdf