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Don’t Until the Final Verb Wait: Reinforcement Learning for Simultaneous Machine Translation

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.

Interpretese vs. Translationese: The Uniqueness of Human Strategies in Simultaneous Interpretation

Computational approaches to simultaneous interpretation are stymied by how little we know about the tactics human interpreters use. We produce a parallel corpus of translated and simultaneously interpreted text and study differences between them through a computational approach. Our analysis reveals that human interpreters regularly apply several effective tactics to reduce translation latency, including sentence segmentation and passivization. In addition to these unique, clever strategies, we show that limited human memory also causes other idiosyncratic properties of human interpretation such as generalization and omission of source content.

Syntax-based Rewriting for Simultaneous Machine Translation

Divergent word order between languages causes delay in simultaneous machine translation. We present a sentence rewriting method that generates more monotonic translations to improve the speedaccuracy tradeoff. We design grammaticality and meaning-preserving syntactic transformation rules that operate on constituent parse trees. We apply the rules to reference translations to make their word order closer to the source language word order. On Japanese-English translation (two languages with substantially different structure), incorporating the rewritten, more monotonic reference translation into a phrase-based machine translation system enables better translations faster than a baseline system that only uses gold reference translations.