Category Archives: Non classé

OpenNMT is an open-source ecosystem for neural machine translation started in 2016 by SYSTRAN and the Harvard NLP group. The project has been used in numerous research and industry applications, including SYSTRAN Translate and SYSTRAN Model Studio.

OpenNMT’s main goal is to make neural machine translation accessible to everyone. However, neural machine translation is notoriously expensive to run as MT models often require a lot of memory and compute power. Early in this project, SYSTRAN engineers focused on improving the efficiency of OpenNMT inference to reduce cost and improve productivity.

The computational challenge of neural machine translation

Neural machine translation models are usually based on the Transformer architecture which powers many recent advances in natural language processing. A common variant known as “big Transformer” contains about 300 million parameters that are tuned during a training phase. Since the parameters are stored using 32-bit floating-point numbers, the model alone takes at least 1.2 GB on disk and in memory.

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An increasing number of live events such as conferences, meetings, lectures, debates, radio and TV shows, etc. are nowadays being live streamed on video channels and social networks. These events are transmitted in real time to a large audience, on all types of devices and anywhere in the world.

Captioning and live translation¹ are seen as essential in order to ensure that these events reach a growing international audience. How to optimise the comfort and understanding experience of such large audience raises the issue of multilingualism that we discuss in this post. 

In the context of the upcoming French Presidency of European Union in January 2022, SYSTRAN has developed a tool called Speech Translator for real-time captioning and translation of single-speaker speeches or multi-speaker meetings. Starting with French or English as the source spoken language, Speech Translator : 

1. transcribes the original speech, partnering for this task with Vocapia Automatic Speech Recognition², 
2. punctuates and segments the automatic speech recognition (ASR) output, making this automatically formatted and corrected transcription available to human reviewer and audience (speech transcription/captioning),
3. simultaneously runs machine translation (MT) powered by our best quality translation models towards European Union languages (speech translation/subtitling),  

all of this with the lowest latency and in a dedicated and user-friendly interface. The task closely resembles simultaneous interpreting, which performs real-time multilingual translations. The next figure shows a screenshot of our live ST system interface where captions (left) as well as the corresponding English translations (right) are displayed. 

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