Simultaneous neural machine translation with a reinforced attention mechanism

Abstract

To translate in real time, a simultaneous translation system should determine when to stop reading source tokens and generate target tokens corresponding to a partial source sentence read up to that point. However, conventional attention-based neural machine translation (NMT) models cannot produce translations with adequate latency in online scenarios because they wait until a source sentence is completed to compute alignment between the source and target tokens. To address this issue, we propose a reinforced learning (RL)-based attention mechanism, the reinforced attention mechanism, which allows a neural translation model to jointly train the stopping criterion and a partial translation model. The proposed attention mechanism comprises two modules, one to ensure translation quality and the other to address latency. Different from previous RL-based simultaneous translation systems, which learn the stopping criterion from a fixed NMT model, the modules can be trained jointly with a novel reward function. In our experiments, the proposed model has better translation quality and comparable latency compared to previous models.