Anoop Sarkar SFU Computer Science

Hassan Shavarani passes his MSc thesis exam

Hassan Shavarani successfully defended his MSc thesis on May 9th 2016.

The title of the thesis: “Training Data Annotation for Segmentation Classification in Simultaneous Translation”.

The abstract:

Segmentation of the incoming speech stream and translating segments incrementally is a commonly used technique that improves latency in spoken language translation. Previous work (Oda et al. 2014) has explored creating training data for segmentation by finding segments that maximize translation quality with a user-defined bound on segment length. In this work, we provide a new algorithm, using Pareto-optimality, for finding good segment boundaries that can balance the trade-off between latency versus translation quality. We compare against the state-of-the-art greedy algorithm from (Oda et al. 2014). Our experimental results show that we can improve latency by up to 12% without harming the Bleu score for the same average segment length. Another benefit is that for any segment size, Pareto-optimal segments maximize latency and translation quality.

M.Sc. Examining Committee:

  • Dr. Anoop Sarkar, Senior Supervisor
  • Dr. Fred Popowich, Supervisor
  • Dr. William D. Lewis, Examiner, Microsoft Research and University of Washington
  • Dr. Arrvindh Shriraman, Chair

More information on the Student theses page