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Main Authors: Issam, Abderrahmane, Semerci, Yusuf Can, Scholtes, Jan, Spanakis, Gerasimos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13469
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author Issam, Abderrahmane
Semerci, Yusuf Can
Scholtes, Jan
Spanakis, Gerasimos
author_facet Issam, Abderrahmane
Semerci, Yusuf Can
Scholtes, Jan
Spanakis, Gerasimos
contents Simultaneous machine translation aims at solving the task of real-time translation by starting to translate before consuming the full input, which poses challenges in terms of balancing quality and latency of the translation. The wait-$k$ policy offers a solution by starting to translate after consuming $k$ words, where the choice of the number $k$ directly affects the latency and quality. In applications where we seek to keep the choice over latency and quality at inference, the wait-$k$ policy obliges us to train more than one model. In this paper, we address the challenge of building one model that can fulfil multiple latency levels and we achieve this by introducing lightweight adapter modules into the decoder. The adapters are trained to be specialized for different wait-$k$ values and compared to other techniques they offer more flexibility to allow for reaping the benefits of parameter sharing and minimizing interference. Additionally, we show that by combining with an adaptive strategy, we can further improve the results. Experiments on two language directions show that our method outperforms or competes with other strong baselines on most latency values.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_13469
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fixed and Adaptive Simultaneous Machine Translation Strategies Using Adapters
Issam, Abderrahmane
Semerci, Yusuf Can
Scholtes, Jan
Spanakis, Gerasimos
Computation and Language
Simultaneous machine translation aims at solving the task of real-time translation by starting to translate before consuming the full input, which poses challenges in terms of balancing quality and latency of the translation. The wait-$k$ policy offers a solution by starting to translate after consuming $k$ words, where the choice of the number $k$ directly affects the latency and quality. In applications where we seek to keep the choice over latency and quality at inference, the wait-$k$ policy obliges us to train more than one model. In this paper, we address the challenge of building one model that can fulfil multiple latency levels and we achieve this by introducing lightweight adapter modules into the decoder. The adapters are trained to be specialized for different wait-$k$ values and compared to other techniques they offer more flexibility to allow for reaping the benefits of parameter sharing and minimizing interference. Additionally, we show that by combining with an adaptive strategy, we can further improve the results. Experiments on two language directions show that our method outperforms or competes with other strong baselines on most latency values.
title Fixed and Adaptive Simultaneous Machine Translation Strategies Using Adapters
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13469