We investigate the potential of attention-based neural machine translation in simultaneous translation. We introduce a novel decoding algorithm, called simultaneous greedy decoding, that allows an existing neural machine translation model to begin translating before a full source sentence is received. This approach is unique from previous works on simultaneous translation in that segmentation and translation are done jointly to maximize the translation quality and that translating each segment is strongly conditioned on all the previous segments. This paper presents a first step toward building a full simultaneous translation system based on neural machine translation.
Another major contribution by was to let the policy predict the final verb of a source sentence, which is especially useful in the case of translating from a verb-final language (e.g., German) to another type of language. They do so by having a separate verb-conditioned @math -gram language model of all possible source prefixes. This prediction, explicit in @cite_8 is however done implicitly in neural machine translation, where the decoder acts as strong language model.
@cite_8
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We introduce a reinforcement learningbased approach to simultaneous machine translation—producing a translation while receiving input words— between languages with drastically different word orders: from verb-final languages (e.g., German) to verb-medial languages (English). In traditional machine translation, a translator must “wait” for source material to appear before translation begins. We remove this bottleneck by predicting the final verb in advance. We use reinforcement learning to learn when to trust predictions about unseen, future portions of the sentence. We also introduce an evaluation metric to measure expeditiousness and quality. We show that our new translation model outperforms batch and monotone translation strategies.