Simultaneous speech translation aims to maintain translation quality while minimizing the delay between reading input and incrementally producing the output. We propose a new general-purpose prediction action which predicts future words in the input to improve quality and minimize delay in simultaneous translation. We train this agent using reinforcement learning with a novel reward function. Our agent with prediction has better translation quality and less delay compared to an agent-based simultaneous translation system without prediction.

Phrase-based and hierarchical phrase-based (Hiero) translation models differ radically in the way reordering is modeled. Lexicalized reordering models play an important role in phrase-based MT and such models have been added to CKY-based decoders for Hiero. Watanabe et al. (2006) proposed a promising decoding algorithm for Hiero (LR-Hiero) that visits input spans in arbitrary order and produces the translation in left to right (LR) order which leads to far fewer language model calls and leads to a considerable speedup in decoding. We introduce a novel shift-reduce algorithm to LR-Hiero to decode with our lexicalized reordering model (LRM) and show that it improves translation quality for Czech-English, Chinese-English and German-English.

Left-to-right (LR) decoding Watanabe et al. (2006) is a promising decoding algorithm for hierarchical phrase-based translation (Hiero) that visits input spans in arbitrary order producing the output translation in left to right order. This leads to far fewer language model calls. But the constrained SCFG grammar used in LR-Hiero (GNF) with at most two non-terminals is unable to account for some complex phrasal reordering. Allowing more non-terminals in the rules results in a more expressive grammar. LR-decoding can be used to decode with SCFGs with more than two non-terminals, but the CKY decoders used for Hiero systems cannot deal with such expressive grammars due to a blowup in computational complexity. In this paper we present a dynamic programming algorithm for GNF rule extraction which efficiently extracts sentence level SCFG rule sets with an arbitrary number of non-terminals. We analyze the performance of the obtained grammar for statistical machine translation on three language pairs.