An empirical study on many-to-many simultaneous machine translation
2022
Simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) is a challenging task which aims to translate a source sequence to the target language with low latency. Despite significant progress in SimulMT, there has not been much work in the area of multilingual SimulMT where a single model is capable of translating between multiple language pairs. This paper studies SimulMT from a multilingual perspective. Through our experiments, we first compare several language tag strategies, and show that language tag strategies can effectively adapt a unidirectional SimulMT model to translate multiple language arcs. Second, we find that SimulMT models trained on a language family perform better than a global model. Finally, we demonstrate that it is possible to improve the performances of multilingual SimulMT models by transferring embeddings from a pre-trained language model such as multilingual BERT.
Research areas