From Simultaneous to Streaming Machine Translation by Leveraging Streaming History

Jorge Civera, Alfons Juan-Císcar, Javier Iranzo-Sánchez

Abstract:

Simultaneous Machine Translation is the task
of incrementally translating an input sentence
before it is fully available. Currently, simul-
taneous translation is carried out by translat-
ing each sentence independently of the previ-
ously translated text. More generally, Stream-
ing MT can be understood as an extension of
Simultaneous MT to the incremental transla-
tion of a continuous input text stream. In this
work, a state-of-the-art simultaneous sentence-
level MT system is extended to the stream-
ing setup by leveraging the streaming history.
Extensive empirical results are reported on
IWSLT Translation Tasks, showing that lever-
aging the streaming history leads to significant
quality gains. In particular, the proposed sys-
tem proves to compare favorably to the best
performing systems.