# Rethinking the Reasonability of the Test Set for Simultaneous Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00969 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00969/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [SimAlign: High Quality Word Alignments without Parallel Training Data using Static and Contextualized Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08728/) (2020)
- [Learning to Translate in Real-time with Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00388/) (2016)
- [Monotonic Multihead Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12406/) (2019)
- [Can neural machine translation do simultaneous translation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02012/) (2016)
- [Efficient Wait-k Models for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08595/) (2020)
- [Low-Latency Neural Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00491/) (2018)
- [Re-translation versus Streaming for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03643/) (2020)
- [Re-Translation Strategies For Long Form, Simultaneous, Spoken Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03393/) (2019)
- [Improving Simultaneous Translation by Incorporating Pseudo-References with Fewer Reorderings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11247/) (2020)
- [Gaussian Multi-head Attention for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09072/) (2022)
- [BSTC: A Large-Scale Chinese-English Speech Translation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03575/) (2021)
- [Lost in Interpreting: Speech Translation from Source or Interpreter?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09343/) (2021)
- [It is Not as Good as You Think! Evaluating Simultaneous Machine Translation on Interpretation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05213/) (2021)
- [Anticipation-Free Training for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12868/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) models start translation before the end of the source sentence, making the translation monotonically aligned with the source sentence. However, the general full-sentence translation test set is acquired by offline translation of the entire source sentence, which is not designed for SimulMT evaluation, making us rethink whether this will underestimate the performance of SimulMT models. In this paper, we manually annotate a monotonic test set based on the MuST-C English-Chinese test set, denoted as SiMuST-C. Our human evaluation confirms the acceptability of our annotated test set. Evaluations on three different SimulMT models verify that the underestimation problem can be alleviated on our test set. Further experiments show that finetuning on an automatically extracted monotonic training set improves SimulMT models by up to 3 BLEU points.