Monotonic Multihead Attention

Simultaneous machine translation models start generating a target sequence before they have encoded or read the source sequence. Recent approach for this task either apply a fixed policy on transformer, or a learnable monotonic attention on a weaker recurrent neural network based structure. In this paper, we propose a new attention mechanism, Monotonic Multihead Attention (MMA), which introduced the monotonic attention mechanism to multihead attention. We also introduced two novel interpretable approaches for latency control that are specifically designed for multiple attentions. We apply MMA to the simultaneous machine translation task and demonstrate better latency-quality tradeoffs compared to MILk, the previous state-of-the-art approach.

Authors

• Xutai Ma
• Juan Pino 0001
• James Cross 0003
• Liezl Puzon
• Jiatao Gu

Keywords

• Simultaneous Translation
• Transformer
• Monotonic Attention