Cross-attention is an important component of neural machine translation (NMT), which is always realized by dot-product attention in previous methods. However, dot-product attention only considers the pair-wise correlation between words, resulting in dispersion when dealing with long sentences and neglect of source neighboring relationships. Inspired by linguistics, the above issues are caused by ignoring a type of cross-attention, called concentrated attention, which focuses on several central words and then spreads around them. In this work, we apply Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to model the concentrated attention in cross-attention. Experiments and analyses we conducted on three datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline and has significant improvement on alignment quality, N-gram accuracy, and long sentence translation.

Simultaneous translation (ST) outputs the translation simultaneously while reading the input sentence, which is an important component of simultaneous interpretation. In this paper, we describe our submitted ST system, which won the first place in the streaming transcription input track of the Chinese-English translation task of AutoSimTrans 2021. Aiming at the robustness of ST, we first propose char-level simultaneous translation and applied wait-k policy on it. Meanwhile, we apply two data processing methods and combine two training methods for domain adaptation. Our method enhance the ST model with stronger robustness and domain adaptability. Experiments on streaming transcription show that our method outperforms the baseline at all latency, especially at low latency, the proposed method improves about 6 BLEU. Besides, ablation studies we conduct verify the effectiveness of each module in the proposed method.

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) generates translation before reading the entire source sentence and hence it has to trade off between translation quality and latency. To fulfill the requirements of different translation quality and latency in practical applications, the previous methods usually need to train multiple SiMT models for different latency levels, resulting in large computational costs. In this paper, we propose a universal SiMT model with Mixture-of-Experts Wait-k Policy to achieve the best translation quality under arbitrary latency with only one trained model. Specifically, our method employs multi-head attention to accomplish the mixture of experts where each head is treated as a wait-k expert with its own waiting words number, and given a test latency and source inputs, the weights of the experts are accordingly adjusted to produce the best translation. Experiments on three datasets show that our method outperforms all the strong baselines under different latency, including the state-of-the-art adaptive policy.