CVPR 2021 Invited Talk: Simultaneous Translation: Breakthrough and Recent Progress (Liang Huang)

CVPR 2021 Invited Talk
http://cvpr2021.thecvf.com/node/141

Simultaneous Translation: Breakthrough and Recent Progress
Liang Huang

(based in part on ACL 2019 Keynote Speech)

Simultaneous interpretation (i.e., translating concurrently with the source language speech) is widely used in many scenarios including multilateral organizations (UN/EU), international summits (APEC/G-20), legal proceedings, and press conferences. However, it is well known to be one of the most challenging tasks for humans due to the simultaneous perception and production in two languages. As a result, there are only a few thousand professional simultaneous interpreters world-wide, and each of them can only sustain for 15-30 minutes in each turn. On the other hand, simultaneous translation (either speech-to-text or speech-to-speech) is also notoriously difficult for machines and has remained one of the holy grails of AI. A key challenge here is the word order difference between the source and target languages. For example, if you simultaneously translate German (an SOV language) to English (an SVO language), you often have to wait for the sentence-final German verb. Therefore, most existing "real-time" translation systems resort to conventional full-sentence translation, causing an undesirable latency of at least one sentence, rendering the audience largely out of sync with the speaker. There have been efforts towards genuine simultaneous translation, but with limited success.

Recently, we discovered a much simpler and surprisingly effective approach to simultaneous (speech-to-text) translation by designing a "prefix-to-prefix" framework tailed to simultaneity requirements. This is in contrast with the "sequence-to-sequence" framework which assumes the availability of the full input sentence. Our approach results in the first simultaneous translation system that achieves reasonable translation quality with controllable latency and was successfully deployed in many commercial products.

Since 2019, our work has attracted renewed interest in this long-standing problem which was once thought to be out of reach. I will also discuss our efforts towards the ultimate goal of simultaneous speech-to-speech translation, and conclude with a list of remaining challenges.

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