SIMULEVAL: An Evaluation Toolkit for Simultaneous Translation

Xutai Ma, Mohammad Javad Dousti, Changhan Wang, Jiatao Gu, Juan Pino


Abstract
Simultaneous translation on both text and speech focuses on a real-time and low-latency scenario where the model starts translating before reading the complete source input. Evaluating simultaneous translation models is more complex than offline models because the latency is another factor to consider in addition to translation quality. The research community, despite its growing focus on novel modeling approaches to simultaneous translation, currently lacks a universal evaluation procedure. Therefore, we present SimulEval, an easy-to-use and general evaluation toolkit for both simultaneous text and speech translation. A server-client scheme is introduced to create a simultaneous translation scenario, where the server sends source input and receives predictions for evaluation and the client executes customized policies. Given a policy, it automatically performs simultaneous decoding and collectively reports several popular latency metrics. We also adapt latency metrics from text simultaneous translation to the speech task. Additionally, SimulEval is equipped with a visualization interface to provide better understanding of the simultaneous decoding process of a system. SimulEval has already been extensively used for the IWSLT 2020 shared task on simultaneous speech translation. Code will be released upon publication.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-demos.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
October
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Qun Liu, David Schlangen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
144–150
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-demos.19
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-demos.19
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xutai Ma, Mohammad Javad Dousti, Changhan Wang, Jiatao Gu, and Juan Pino. 2020. SIMULEVAL: An Evaluation Toolkit for Simultaneous Translation. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 144–150, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SIMULEVAL: An Evaluation Toolkit for Simultaneous Translation (Ma et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-demos.19.pdf