Multilingual simultaneous neural machine translation

Philip Arthur, Dongwon K. Ryu, Reza Haffari

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference PaperResearchpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Simultaneous machine translation (SIMT) involves translating source utterances to the target language in real-time before the speaker utterance completes. This paper proposes the multilingual approach to SIMT, where a single model simultaneously translates between multiple language-pairs. This not only results
in more efficiency in terms of the number of models and parameters (hence simpler deployment), but may also lead to higher performing models by capturing commonalities among the languages. We further explore simple and effective multilingual architectures based on two strong recently proposed SIMT models. Our results on translating from two Germanic languages (German, Dutch) and three Romance languages (French, Italian, Romanian) into English
show (i) the single multilingual model is on-par or better than individual models, and (ii) multilingual SIMT models trained based on language families are on-par or better than the universal model trained for all languages.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationACL-IJCNLP 2021
EditorsChengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Place of PublicationStroudsburg PA USA
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages4758–4766
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085541
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
EventAnnual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics and International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing 2021 - Online, Bangkok, Thailand
Duration: 1 Aug 20216 Aug 2021
Conference number: 59th & 11th
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.0/ (Proceedings)
https://2021.aclweb.org (Website)
https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2021.findings-acl/ (Findings Proceedings)
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.100/ (Proceedings Short)

Conference

ConferenceAnnual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics and International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing 2021
Abbreviated titleACL-IJCNLP 2021
Country/TerritoryThailand
CityBangkok
Period1/08/216/08/21
Internet address

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