

Baidu Research Announces Breakthrough in Simultaneous Translation - kaibo
https://simultrans-demo.github.io/
We are excited to announce STACL, the first simultaneous translation system w&#x2F; integrated anticipation &amp; controllable latency. This is a major breakthrough in #NLP due to word order differences between languages and simultaneity requirement. Demo &amp; paper: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;2yTCvjE
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sarabande
Really cool demo! Just a note, the last example is corrupted at least for me
in Firefox on mobile (but not Firefox on a computer).

Curious how this would work translating between a language like German where
verbs sometimes are placed at the very end. Or even if clauses make things
complicated. You wouldn't know the meaning for a long time -- or would you
guess and amend?

To make this concrete (DE <-> ZH) with EN provided for clarity, apologies for
errors:

[EN] I didn't go out last evening, because my mother had warned me about feral
cats on the street.

[FROM ZH] 昨晚我不去出因为我妈妈警告我街上有野猫。

[TO DE] Gestern Abend bin ich nicht rausgegangen, weil meine Mutter mich vor
Wildkatzen auf der Straße gewarnt hatte.

In that German sentence, the key verb in the second clause "to warn [warnen]"
happens nearly at the end, but in the beginning in Chinese [警告].

So if I'm halfway through the second clause of my Chinese sentence,
...因为我妈妈警告我, the simultaneous translation in German is "weil meine Mutter
[.....]" and then all at once "mich vor Wildkatzen auf der Straße gewarnt
hatte" when the Chinese sentence finally ends.

I suppose you could split the clause again to give some "early" meaning in the
sentence in real-time: "weil meine Mutter mich davor gewarnt hatte, dass
[...]" and then the bit about the wild cats when it shows up in the Chinese
sentence, but I'm sure you can construct more pathological examples so my
question still stands.

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zmk_
Reminds me of the joke about interpreters at the European Parliament. It goes
something like this: there are always 3 waves of laughter when an MEP says
something funny. First are the natives, then most of others who rely on
translation, last are the Germans who wait for the verb.

~~~
captainmuon
You can turn it around, it's the English who have to wait for the object.

I think in such a translation system (to text) you could just insert a
placeholder and replace it later. Or (in speech) you'd just delay the sentence
until it is complete. If you reach a timeout, you just render it
ungramatically in the wrong word order. Especially when speaking freely and
making up the sentence on the spot, you could say something like "because my
mother... about wild cats on the street... [uhhm, you know] ... she warned
me".

Chinese also sometimes has "strange" word order for western ears, when you
just state the "topic" upfront instead of building a relative clause like you
would in English or German. "[Talking about] wild cats on the street, my
mother warns me".

A live translation system will always have a tradeoff between
accurracy+elegance and latency, just like real human translators.

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2pointsomone
Is the code for your paper available in a Github repo?

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dis-sys
just wondering when there will be a paper submission to a top ranking
conference in the area actually AI translated from the native language of its
authors. or maybe it has already been done before? :)

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ramblerouser
So this article is the only thing this poster has ever submitted, which is a
bit suspicious in itself, but additionally the account being non-civil in
attacking my criticism has basically only commented on this one article.
Pretty strange I'd say.

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SamBam
There's a quote from a book that I can't quite recall, but related to German
professors droning on with ever-more deeply nested sentences, and finally
finishing with all the verbs at the end, leaving the poor students utterly
lost as to which verb went with which sub-clause.

Anyway, great story, I'm sure, but it seem apropos.

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daminglu
Awesome demo!

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ramblerouser
In Demo IV it's clear that this is intended to be used without correcting
previous output. So with a look-ahead of 3 words it outputs the exact opposite
of the intended meaning. For this to be practical, the look ahead probably has
to be the whole sentence, defeating the purpose.

The propaganda push in Western media to build up and legitimize Chinese
academia and technology ventures is staggering. Check out that map at the
bottom. This article is more popular in EU and US than China itself. 99.9% of
the chinese economy is built around stolen or borrowed technology. So what
would be a minor development by a western researcher is a "breakthrough" for
Baidu.

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withhighprod
Keep thinking in that way, it’s great for your mental health

~~~
ramblerouser
I know you mean well, but please take a look at the Hackernews guidelines
linked at the bottom of the page, specifically the following two passages.

>Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as
a topic gets more divisive.

>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
good critical comment teaches us something.

These are great guidelines, I really appreciate the thoughtfulness of whoever
wrote them.

~~~
withhighprod
Sorry since it’s hate speech in the first place, I couldn’t help

