Learning Coupled Policies for Simultaneous Machine Translation

In simultaneous machine translation, the system needs to incrementally generate the output translation before the input sentence ends. This is a coupled decision process consisting of a programmer and interpreter. The programmer's policy decides about when to WRITE the next output or READ the next input, and the interpreter's policy decides what word to write. We present an imitation learning (IL) approach to efficiently learn effective coupled programmer-interpreter policies. To enable IL, we present an algorithmic oracle to produce oracle READ/WRITE actions for training bilingual sentence-pairs using the notion of word alignments. We attribute the effectiveness of the learned coupled policies to (i) scheduled sampling addressing the coupled exposure bias, and (ii) quality of oracle actions capturing enough information from the partial input before writing the output. Experiments show our method outperforms strong baselines in terms of translation quality and delay, when translating from German/Arabic/Czech/Bulgarian/Romanian to English.