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STACL: Simultaneous Translation with Implicit Anticipation and Controllable Latency using Prefix-to-Prefix Framework

19 Oct 2018ACL 2019 7arXiv:1810.08398archive 2025-07-28

Mingbo Ma, Liang Huang, Hao Xiong, Renjie Zheng, Kaibo Liu, Baigong Zheng, Chuanqiang Zhang, Zhongjun He, Hairong Liu, Xing Li, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang

Simultaneous translation, which translates sentences before they are finished, is useful in many scenarios but is notoriously difficult due to word-order differences. While the conventional seq-to-seq framework is only suitable for full-sentence translation, we propose a novel prefix-to-prefix framework for simultaneous translation that implicitly learns to anticipate in a single translation model. Within this framework, we present a very simple yet surprisingly effective wait-k policy trained to generate the target sentence concurrently with the source sentence, but always k words behind. Experiments show our strategy achieves low latency and reasonable quality (compared to full-sentence translation) on 4 directions: zh<->en and de<->en.

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SimulTrans-demo/STACL mentioned on GitHub report
autosimtrans/SimulTransBaseline mentioned on GitHubpaddle report

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3ran · honoured contract
1ran · our draft was wrong
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RW2AL SimulTrans-demo/STACL/metricAL.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 1e12be0930347114 · report
RW2AL_file SimulTrans-demo/STACL/metricAL.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract no licence file found · pointer only · cce6fead28f0af30 · report
RW2AP SimulTrans-demo/STACL/metricAL.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · b1f4c7e40dfb8b33 · report
position_encoding_init autosimtrans/SimulTransBaseline/model.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · 1492225d0a37a248 · report
post_process_seq autosimtrans/SimulTransBaseline/predict.py community (archive-listed) ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · e85b5e345fefc0d0 · report

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