Does larger granularity lead to better translation quality?
It depends on the model used.
In this paper, we present DuTongChuan, a novel context-aware translation model for simultaneous interpreting. This model allows to constantly read streaming text from the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model and simultaneously determine the boundaries of Information Units (IUs) one after another. The detected IU is then translated into a fluent translation with two simple yet effective decoding strategies: partial decoding and context-aware decoding. In practice, by controlling the granularity of IUs and the size of the context, we can get a good trade-off between latency and translation quality easily. Elaborate evaluation from human translators reveals that our system achieves promising translation quality (85.71% for Chinese-English, and 86.36% for English-Chinese), specially in the sense of surprisingly good discourse coherence. According to an End-to-End (speech-to-speech simultaneous interpreting) evaluation, this model presents impressive performance in reducing latency (to less than 3 seconds at most times). Furthermore, we successfully deploy this model in a variety of Baidu's products which have hundreds of millions of users, and we release it as a service in our AI platform.
Recent progress in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT), has facilitated the research on automatic speech translation with applications to live and streaming scenarios such as Simultaneous Interpreting (SI). In contrast to non-real time speech translation, simultaneous interpreting involves starting translating source speech, before the speaker finishes speaking (translating the on-going speech while listening to it). Because of this distinguishing feature, simultaneous interpreting is widely used by multilateral organizations (UN/EU), international summits (APEC/G-20), legal proceedings, and press conferences. Despite of recent advance BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , the research on simultaneous interpreting is notoriously difficult BIBREF0 due to well known challenging requirements: high-quality translation and low latency. Many studies present methods to improve the translation quality by enhancing the robustness of translation model against ASR errors BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 . On the other hand, to reduce latency, some researchers propose models that start translating after reading a few source tokens BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 , BIBREF1 . As one representative work related to this topic, recently, we present a translation model using prefix-to-prefix framework with INLINEFORM0 policy BIBREF0 . This model is simple yet effective in practice, achieving impressive performance both on translation quality and latency. However, existing work pays less attention to the fluency of translation, which is extremely important in the context of simultaneous translation. For example, we have a sub-sentence NMT model that starts to translate after reading a sub-sentence rather than waiting until the end of a sentence like the full-sentence models does. This will definitely reduce the time waiting for the source language speech. However, as shown in the Figure FIGREF2 , the translation for each sub-sentence is barely adequate, whereas the translation of the entire source sentence lacks coherence and fluency. Moreover, it is clear that the model produces an inappropriate translation “your own” for the source token “自己” due to the absence of the preceding sub-sentence. To make the simultaneous machine translation more accessible and producible, we borrow SI strategies used by human interpreters to create our model. As shown in Figure FIGREF3 , this model is able to constantly read streaming text from the ASR model, and simultaneously determine the boundaries of Information Units (IUs) one after another. Each detected IU is then translated into a fluent translation with two simple yet effective decoding strategies: partial decoding and context-aware decoding. Specifically, IUs at the beginning of each sentence are sent to the partial decoding module. Other information units, either appearing in the middle or at the end of a sentence, are translated into target language by the context-aware decoding module. Notice that this module is able to exploit additional context from the history so that the model can generate coherent translation. This method is derived from the “salami technique” BIBREF13 , BIBREF14 , or “chunking”, one of the most commonly used strategies by human interpreters to cope with the linearity constraint in simultaneous interpreting. Having severely limited access to source speech structure in SI, interpreters tend to slice up the incoming speech into smaller meaningful pieces that can be directly rendered or locally reformulated without having to wait for the entire sentence to unfold. In general, there are several remarkable novel advantages that differ our model from the previous work: For a comprehensive evaluation of our system, we use two evaluation metrics: translation quality and latency. According to the automatic evaluation metric, our system presents excellent performance both in translation quality and latency. In the speech-to-speech scenario, our model achieves an acceptability of 85.71% for Chinese-English translation, and 86.36% for English-Chinese translation in human evaluation. Moreover, the output speech lags behind the source speech by an average of less than 3 seconds, which presents surprisingly good experience for machine translation users BIBREF15 , BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 . We also ask three interpreters with SI experience to simultaneously interpret the test speech in a mock conference setting. However, the target texts transcribed from human SI obtain worse BLEU scores as the reference in the test set are actually from written translating rather than simultaneous interpreting. More importantly, when evaluated by human translators, the performance of NMT model is comparable to the professional human interpreter. The contributions of this paper can be concluded into the following aspects: