Segmentation-Free Streaming Machine Translation

Streaming Machine Translation (MT) is the task of translating an unbounded input text stream in real-time. The traditional cascade approach, which combines an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and an MT system, relies on an intermediate segmentation step which splits the transcription stream into sentence-like units. However, the incorporation of a hard segmentation constrains the MT system and is a source of errors. This paper proposes a Segmentation-Free framework that enables the model to translate an unsegmented source stream by delaying the segmentation decision until the translation has been generated. Extensive experiments show how the proposed Segmentation-Free framework has better quality-latency trade-off than competing approaches that use an independent segmentation model. Software, data and models will be released upon paper acceptance.

From Simultaneous to Streaming Machine Translation by Leveraging Streaming History

Simultaneous Machine Translation is the task of incrementally translating an input sentence before it is fully available. Currently, simultaneous translation is carried out by translating each sentence independently of the previously translated text. More generally, Streaming MT can be understood as an extension of Simultaneous MT to the incremental translation of a continuous input text stream. In this work, a state-of-the-art simultaneous sentence-level MT system is extended to the streaming setup by leveraging the streaming history. Extensive empirical results are reported on IWSLT Translation Tasks, showing that leveraging the streaming history leads to significant quality gains. In particular, the proposed system proves to compare favorably to the best performing systems.

Stream-level Latency Evaluation for Simultaneous Machine Translation

Simultaneous machine translation has recently gained traction thanks to significant quality improvements and the advent of streaming applications. Simultaneous translation systems need to find a trade-off between translation quality and response time, and with this purpose multiple latency measures have been proposed. However, latency evaluations for simultaneous translation are estimated at the sentence level, not taking into account the sequential nature of a streaming scenario. Indeed, these sentence-level latency measures are not well suited for continuous stream translation resulting in figures that are not coherent with the simultaneous translation policy of the system being assessed. This work proposes a stream-level adaptation of the current latency measures based on a re-segmentation approach applied to the output translation, that is successfully evaluated on streaming conditions for a reference IWSLT task.

Europarl-ST: A Multilingual Corpus For Speech Translation Of Parliamentary Debates

Current research into spoken language translation (SLT) is often hampered by the lack of specific data resources for this task, as currently available SLT datasets are restricted to a limited set of language pairs. In this paper we present Europarl-ST, a novel multilingual SLT corpus containing paired audio-text samples for SLT from and into 6 European languages, for a total of 30 different translation directions. This corpus has been compiled using the debates held in the European Parliament in the period between 2008 and 2012. This paper describes the corpus creation process and presents a series of automatic speech recognition, machine translation and spoken language translation experiments that highlight the potential of this new resource. The corpus is released under a Creative Commons license and is freely accessible and downloadable.