Adaptive Simultaneous Sign Language Translation with Confident Translation Length Estimation

Tong Sun, Biao Fu, Cong Hu, Liang Zhang, Ruiquan Zhang, Xiaodong Shi, Jinsong Su, Yidong Chen


Abstract
Traditional non-simultaneous Sign Language Translation (SLT) methods, while effective for pre-recorded videos, face challenges in real-time scenarios due to inherent inference delays. The emerging field of simultaneous SLT aims to address this issue by progressively translating incrementally received sign video. However, the sole existing work in simultaneous SLT adopts a fixed gloss-based policy, which suffer from limitations in boundary prediction and contextual comprehension. In this paper, we delve deeper into this area and propose an adaptive policy for simultaneous SLT. Our approach introduces the concept of “confident translation length”, denoting maximum accurate translation achievable from current input. An estimator measures this length for streaming sign video, enabling the model to make informed decisions on whether to wait for more input or proceed with translation. To train the estimator, we construct a training data of confident translation length based on the longest common prefix between translations of partial and complete inputs. Furthermore, we incorporate adaptive training, utilizing pseudo prefix pairs, to refine the offline translation model for optimal performance in simultaneous scenarios. Experimental results on PHOENIX2014T and CSL-Daily demonstrate the superiority of our adaptive policy over existing methods, particularly excelling in situations requiring extremely low latency.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.34
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
372–384
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.34
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tong Sun, Biao Fu, Cong Hu, Liang Zhang, Ruiquan Zhang, Xiaodong Shi, Jinsong Su, and Yidong Chen. 2024. Adaptive Simultaneous Sign Language Translation with Confident Translation Length Estimation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 372–384, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Adaptive Simultaneous Sign Language Translation with Confident Translation Length Estimation (Sun et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.34.pdf