Non-autoregressive Streaming Transformer for Simultaneous Translation

Zhengrui Ma, Shaolei Zhang, Shoutao Guo, Chenze Shao, Min Zhang, Yang Feng


Abstract
Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) models are trained to strike a balance between latency and translation quality. However, training these models to achieve high quality while maintaining low latency often leads to a tendency for aggressive anticipation. We argue that such issue stems from the autoregressive architecture upon which most existing SiMT models are built. To address those issues, we propose non-autoregressive streaming Transformer (NAST) which comprises a unidirectional encoder and a non-autoregressive decoder with intra-chunk parallelism. We enable NAST to generate the blank token or repetitive tokens to adjust its READ/WRITE strategy flexibly, and train it to maximize the non-monotonic latent alignment with an alignment-based latency loss. Experiments on various SiMT benchmarks demonstrate that NAST outperforms previous strong autoregressive SiMT baselines.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.314
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5177–5190
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.314
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.314
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhengrui Ma, Shaolei Zhang, Shoutao Guo, Chenze Shao, Min Zhang, and Yang Feng. 2023. Non-autoregressive Streaming Transformer for Simultaneous Translation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5177–5190, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Non-autoregressive Streaming Transformer for Simultaneous Translation (Ma et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.314.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.314.mp4