Decision Attentive Regularization to Improve Simultaneous Speech Translation Systems

Simultaneous Speech-to-text Translation (SimulST) systems translate source speech in tandem with the speaker using partial input. Recent works have tried to leverage the text translation task to improve the performance of Speech Translation (ST) in the offline domain. Motivated by these improvements, we propose to add Decision Attentive Regularization (DAR) to Monotonic Multihead Attention (MMA) based SimulST systems. DAR improves the read/write decisions for speech using the Simultaneous text Translation (SimulMT) task. We also extend several techniques from the offline domain to the SimulST task. Our proposed system achieves significant performance improvements for the MuST-C English-German (EnDe) SimulST task, where we provide an average BLUE score improvement of around 4.57 points or 34.17% across different latencies. Further, the latency-quality tradeoffs establish that the proposed model achieves better results compared to the baseline.