Anticipating Future with Large Language Model for Simultaneous Machine Translation
Siqi Ouyang, Oleksii Hrinchuk, Zhehuai Chen, Vitaly Lavrukhin, Jagadeesh Balam, Lei Li, Boris Ginsburg
Abstract
Simultaneous machine translation (SMT) takes streaming input utterances and incrementally produces target text. Existing SMT methods only use the partial utterance that has already arrived at the input and the generated hypothesis. Motivated by human interpreters’ technique to forecast future words before hearing them, we propose Translation by Anticipating Future (TAF), a method to improve translation quality while retaining low latency. Its core idea is to use a large language model (LLM) to predict future source words and opportunistically translate without introducing too much risk. We evaluate our TAF and multiple baselines of SMT on four language directions. Experiments show that TAF achieves the best translation quality-latency trade-off and outperforms the baselines by up to 5 BLEU points at the same latency (three words).
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ouyang-etal-2025-anticipating,
title = "Anticipating Future with Large Language Model for Simultaneous Machine Translation",
author = "Ouyang, Siqi and
Hrinchuk, Oleksii and
Chen, Zhehuai and
Lavrukhin, Vitaly and
Balam, Jagadeesh and
Li, Lei and
Ginsburg, Boris",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.286/",
pages = "5547--5557",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6"
}