Information-Transport-based Policy for Simultaneous Translation

Understand

Simultaneous translation (ST) outputs translation while receiving the source inputs, and hence requires a policy to determine whether to translate a target token or wait for the next source token.

• The major challenge of ST is that each target token can only be translated based on the current received source tokens, where the received source information will directly affect the translation quality.
• So naturally, how much source information is received for the translation of the current target token is supposed to be the pivotal evidence for the ST policy to decide between translating and waiting.
• In this paper, we treat the translation as information transport from source to target and accordingly propose an Information-Transport-based Simultaneous Translation (ITST).