# Can neural machine translation do simultaneous translation?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.02012 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02012/

## Key facts

- Cited by 86 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 86)

- [Over-Generation Cannot Be Rewarded: Length-Adaptive Average Lagging for Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05807/) (2022)
- [RealTranS: End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation with Convolutional Weighted-Shrinking Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04833/) (2021)
- [Information-Transport-based Policy for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12357/) (2022)
- [TransLLaMa: LLM-based Simultaneous Translation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04636/) (2024)
- [Universal Simultaneous Machine Translation with Mixture-of-Experts Wait-k Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05238/) (2021)
- [Learning When to Translate for Streaming Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07368/) (2021)
- [CUNI-KIT System for Simultaneous Speech Translation Task at IWSLT 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06028/) (2022)
- [SimulSLT: End-to-End Simultaneous Sign Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04228/) (2021)
- [Hidden Markov Transformer for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00257/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation with Differentiable Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16093/) (2023)
- [Modeling Dual Read/Write Paths for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09163/) (2022)
- [StreamSpeech: Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation with Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03049/) (2024)
- [Hybrid Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder Modeling for Speech-to-Text Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03101/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Multi-head Attention for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09072/) (2022)
- [How "Real" is Your Real-Time Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation System?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18495/) (2024)
- [BSTC: A Large-Scale Chinese-English Speech Translation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03575/) (2021)
- [Reducing Position Bias in Simultaneous Machine Translation with Length-Aware Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09053/) (2022)
- [Wait-info Policy: Balancing Source and Target at Information Level for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11220/) (2022)
- [Average Token Delay: A Latency Metric for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13173/) (2022)
- [Exploring Continuous Integrate-and-Fire for Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09595/) (2022)
- [Towards Achieving Human Parity on End-to-end Simultaneous Speech Translation via LLM Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21646/) (2024)
- [SeqPO-SiMT: Sequential Policy Optimization for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20622/) (2025)
- [Stream-level Latency Evaluation for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08817/) (2021)
- [Non-autoregressive Streaming Transformer for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14883/) (2023)
- [Simultaneous Masking, Not Prompting Optimization: A Paradigm Shift in Fine-tuning LLMs for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10443/) (2024)
- [A Non-autoregressive Generation Framework for End-to-End Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06937/) (2024)
- [Direct Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation with Variational Monotonic Multihead Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08250/) (2021)
- [From Simultaneous to Streaming Machine Translation by Leveraging Streaming History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02459/) (2022)
- [MT Metrics Correlate with Human Ratings of Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08633/) (2022)
- [Simultaneous Machine Translation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06706/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We investigate the potential of attention-based neural machine translation in simultaneous translation. We introduce a novel decoding algorithm, called simultaneous greedy decoding, that allows an existing neural machine translation model to begin translating before a full source sentence is received. This approach is unique from previous works on simultaneous translation in that segmentation and translation are done jointly to maximize the translation quality and that translating each segment is strongly conditioned on all the previous segments. This paper presents a first step toward building a full simultaneous translation system based on neural machine translation.