Monotonic Infinite Lookback Attention for Simultaneous Machine Translation

Naveen Arivazhagan, Colin Cherry, Wolfgang Macherey, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Semih Yavuz, Ruoming Pang, Wei Li, Colin Raffel


Abstract
Simultaneous machine translation begins to translate each source sentence before the source speaker is finished speaking, with applications to live and streaming scenarios. Simultaneous systems must carefully schedule their reading of the source sentence to balance quality against latency. We present the first simultaneous translation system to learn an adaptive schedule jointly with a neural machine translation (NMT) model that attends over all source tokens read thus far. We do so by introducing Monotonic Infinite Lookback (MILk) attention, which maintains both a hard, monotonic attention head to schedule the reading of the source sentence, and a soft attention head that extends from the monotonic head back to the beginning of the source. We show that MILk’s adaptive schedule allows it to arrive at latency-quality trade-offs that are favorable to those of a recently proposed wait-k strategy for many latency values.
Anthology ID:
P19-1126
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1313–1323
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1126
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1126
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Naveen Arivazhagan, Colin Cherry, Wolfgang Macherey, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Semih Yavuz, Ruoming Pang, Wei Li, and Colin Raffel. 2019. Monotonic Infinite Lookback Attention for Simultaneous Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1313–1323, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Monotonic Infinite Lookback Attention for Simultaneous Machine Translation (Arivazhagan et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/P19-1126.pdf
Supplementary:
 P19-1126.Supplementary.pdf