For many low-resource or endangered languages, spoken language resources are more likely to be annotated with translations than with transcriptions. Recent work exploits such annotations to produce speech-to-translation alignments, without access to any text transcriptions. We investigate whether providing such information can aid in producing better (mismatched) crowdsourced transcriptions, which in turn could be valuable for training speech recognition systems, and show that they can indeed be beneficial through a small-scale case study as a proof-of-concept. We also present a simple phonetically aware string averaging technique that produces transcriptions of higher quality.
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）
This paper presents a newly developed, simultaneous neural speech-to-speech translation system and its evaluation. The system consists of three fully-incremental neural processing modules for automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT), and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). We investigated its overall latency in the system's Ear-Voice Span and speaking latency along with module-level performance.
We describe a method to jointly pre-train speech and text in an encoder-decoder modeling framework for speech translation and recognition. The proposed method incorporates four self-supervised and supervised subtasks for cross modality learning. A self-supervised speech subtask leverages unlabelled speech data, and a (self-)supervised text to text subtask makes use of abundant text training data. Two auxiliary supervised speech tasks are included to unify speech and text modeling space. Our contribution lies in integrating linguistic information from the text corpus into the speech pre-trainin…
口语翻译（spoken language translation，缩写为EMT）中的最近的工作已经尝试在学习或解码期间不使用源语言转录的情况下构建端到端的语音到文本的翻译。然而，虽然大量的并行文本（例如Europarl、OpenSubtitles）可用于训练机器翻译系统，但是不存在包括与目标语言的文本对齐的源语言的语音的大型（100 h）和开源并行语料库。本文试图填补这一空白，增加现有的（单语）语料库：LibriSpeech。该语料库用于自动语音识别，来自LibriVox项目的有声读物，并经过仔细的分段和对齐。在从LibriSpeech中收集与英语有声读物相对应的法语电子书后，我们将句子级别的语音片段与各自的翻译对齐，并获得236 h的可用并行数据。本文介绍了处理的细节，以及进行人工评估的一个小的子集的语料库。该评估表明，自动对齐分数与双语对齐质量的人类判断合理相关。我们相信，这个语料库（这是在线提供）是有用的直接语音翻译或更一般的口语翻译实验的可复制实验。
End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we propose a text-free evaluation metric for end-to-end S2ST, named BLASER, to avoid the dependency on ASR systems. BLASER leverages a multilingual multimodal encoder to directly encode the speech segments for source input, translation output and reference into a shared embedding space and computes a score o…
We study the possibilities of building a non-autoregressive speech-to-text translation model using connectionist temporal classification (CTC), and use CTC-based automatic speech recognition as an auxiliary task to improve the performance. CTC's success on translation is counter-intuitive due to its monotonicity assumption, so we analyze its reordering capability. Kendall's tau distance is introduced as the quantitative metric, and gradient-based visualization provides an intuitive way to take a closer look into the model. Our analysis shows that transformer encoders have the ability to change…
We introduce MuAViC, a multilingual audio-visual corpus for robust speech recognition and robust speech-to-text translation providing 1200 hours of audio-visual speech in 9 languages. It is fully transcribed and covers 6 English-to-X translation as well as 6 X-to-English translation directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first open benchmark for audio-visual speech-to-text translation and the largest open benchmark for multilingual audio-visual speech recognition. Our baseline results show that MuAViC is effective for building noise-robust speech recognition and translation mode…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Existing speech to speech translation systems heavily rely on the text of target language: they usually translate source language either to target text and then synthesize target speech from text, or directly to target speech with target text for auxiliary training. However, those methods cannot be applied to unwritten target languages, which have no written text or phoneme available. In this paper, we develop a translation system for unwritten languages, named as UWSpeech, which converts target unwritten speech into discrete tokens with a converter, and then translates source-language speech …
We introduce CVSS, a massively multilingual-to-English speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) corpus, covering sentence-level parallel S2ST pairs from 21 languages into English. CVSS is derived from the Common Voice speech corpus and the CoVoST 2 speech-to-text translation (ST) corpus, by synthesizing the translation text from CoVoST 2 into speech using state-of-the-art TTS systems. Two versions of translation speeches are provided: 1) CVSS-C: All the translation speeches are in a single high-quality canonical voice; 2) CVSS-T: The translation speeches are in voices transferred from the correspon…
Automatic Speech Recognition for Greek Medical Dictation
Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business（阿提卡经济与商业大学信息学院）；Omilia Natural Language Solutions Ltd.（Omilia自然语言解决方案有限公司）；Archimedes/Athena RC（阿基米德/雅典RC）
Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is among the most challenging problems in the translation paradigm due to the significant scarcity of S2ST data. While effort has been made to increase the data size from unlabeled speech by cascading pretrained speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT) and text-to-speech (TTS) models; unlabeled text has remained relatively under-utilized to improve S2ST. We propose an effective way to utilize the massive existing unlabeled text from different languages to create a large amount of S2ST data to improve S2ST performance by applying various acou…
Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) models suffer from data scarcity issues as there exists little parallel S2ST data, compared to the amount of data available for conventional cascaded systems that consist of automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT), and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. In this work, we explore self-supervised pre-training with unlabeled speech data and data augmentation to tackle this issue. We take advantage of a recently proposed speech-to-unit translation (S2UT) framework that encodes target speech into discrete representations, and transfer pre-…
Synchronous Speech Recognition and Speech-to-Text Translation with Interactive Decoding
Institute of Automation, CAS（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Speech to Speech Translation with Translatotron: A State of the Art Review
International University of Grand-Bassam（大巴萨姆国际大学）；Covenant University（圣约大学）；HRA, Institute for Systems Science, Durban University of Technology（德班理工大学系统科学研究所HRA中心）；Walter Sisulu University（沃尔特·西苏鲁大学）；Summit University（萨米特大学）
本文综述语音到语音翻译技术，重点梳理 Google 的 Translatotron 1、2、3 如何由概念验证发展到在部分方面超越级联模型，并指出其弥合非洲语言与成熟语言差距的潜力。
Meta - Fundamental AI Research (FAIR)（Meta基础人工智能研究院（FAIR））
The amount of labeled data to train models for speech tasks is limited for most languages, however, the data scarcity is exacerbated for speech translation which requires labeled data covering two different languages. To address this issue, we study a simple and effective approach to build speech translation systems without labeled data by leveraging recent advances in unsupervised speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis, either in a pipeline approach, or to generate pseudo-labels for training end-to-end speech translation models. Furthermore, we present an unsupervised do…
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
We propose a) a Language Agnostic end-to-end Speech Translation model (LAST), and b) a data augmentation strategy to increase code-switching (CS) performance. With increasing globalization, multiple languages are increasingly used interchangeably during fluent speech. Such CS complicates traditional speech recognition and translation, as we must recognize which language was spoken first and then apply a language-dependent recognizer and subsequent translation component to generate the desired target language output. Such a pipeline introduces latency and errors. In this paper, we eliminate the…
StreamSpeech: Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation with Multi-task Learning
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院人工智能安全重点实验室）；School of Future Science and Engineering, Soochow University（苏州大学未来科学与工程学院）
End-to-end speech-to-text translation can provide a simpler and smaller system but is facing the challenge of data scarcity. Pre-training methods can leverage unlabeled data and have been shown to be effective on data-scarce settings. In this work, we explore whether self-supervised pre-trained speech representations can benefit the speech translation task in both high- and low-resource settings, whether they can transfer well to other languages, and whether they can be effectively combined with other common methods that help improve low-resource end-to-end speech translation such as using a p…
Currently, in speech translation, the straightforward approach - cascading a recognition system with a translation system - delivers state-of-the-art results. However, fundamental challenges such as error propagation from the automatic speech recognition system still remain. To mitigate these problems, recently, people turn their attention to direct data and propose various joint training methods. In this work, we seek to answer the question of whether joint training really helps cascaded speech translation. We review recent papers on the topic and also investigate a joint training criterion b…
The paper describes BUT's English to German offline speech translation(ST) systems developed for IWSLT2021. They are based on jointly trained Automatic Speech Recognition-Machine Translation models. Their performances is evaluated on MustC-Common test set. In this work, we study their efficiency from the perspective of having a large amount of separate ASR training data and MT training data, and a smaller amount of speech-translation training data. Large amounts of ASR and MT training data are utilized for pre-training the ASR and MT models. Speech-translation data is used to jointly optimize …
We present ESPnet-ST, which is designed for the quick development of speech-to-speech translation systems in a single framework. ESPnet-ST is a new project inside end-to-end speech processing toolkit, ESPnet, which integrates or newly implements automatic speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech functions for speech translation. We provide all-in-one recipes including data pre-processing, feature extraction, training, and decoding pipelines for a wide range of benchmark datasets. Our reproducible results can match or even outperform the current state-of-the-art performances;…
This paper describes the system submitted to the IWSLT 2021 Multilingual Speech Translation (MultiST) task from Huawei Noah's Ark Lab. We use a unified transformer architecture for our MultiST model, so that the data from different modalities (i.e., speech and text) and different tasks (i.e., Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, and Speech Translation) can be exploited to enhance the model's ability. Specifically, speech and text inputs are firstly fed to different feature extractors to extract acoustic and textual features, respectively. Then, these features are processed by a shared enco…
To alleviate the data scarcity problem in End-to-end speech translation (ST), pre-training on data for speech recognition and machine translation is considered as an important technique. However, the modality gap between speech and text prevents the ST model from efficiently inheriting knowledge from the pre-trained models. In this work, we propose AdaTranS for end-to-end ST. It adapts the speech features with a new shrinking mechanism to mitigate the length mismatch between speech and text features by predicting word boundaries. Experiments on the MUST-C dataset demonstrate that AdaTranS achi…
Speech translation (ST) is the task of directly translating acoustic speech signals in a source language into text in a foreign language. ST task has been addressed, for a long time, using a pipeline approach with two modules : first an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the source language followed by a text-to-text Machine translation (MT). In the past few years, we have seen a paradigm shift towards the end-to-end approaches using sequence-to-sequence deep neural network models. This paper presents our efforts towards the development of the first Broadcast News end-to-end Arabic to Engli…
Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学自然语言处理研究所）
This paper describes the submission to the IWSLT 2021 Low-Resource Speech Translation Shared Task by IMS team. We utilize state-of-the-art models combined with several data augmentation, multi-task and transfer learning approaches for the automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) steps of our cascaded system. Moreover, we also explore the feasibility of a full end-to-end speech translation (ST) model in the case of very constrained amount of ground truth labeled data. Our best system achieves the best performance among all submitted systems for Congolese Swahili to Englis…
This paper describes the winning approach in the Shared Task 3 at SwissText 2021 on Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text, a public competition on dialect recognition and translation. Swiss German refers to the multitude of Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland. Swiss German differs significantly from standard German in pronunciation, word inventory and grammar. It is mostly incomprehensible to native German speakers. Moreover, it lacks a standardized written script. To solve the challenging task, we propose a hybrid automatic speech recognition system wit…
A Very Low Resource Language Speech Corpus for Computational Language Documentation Experiments
LIMSI（法国语言与信息系统实验室）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；LPP（巴黎语言实验室）；ENS（巴黎高等师范学院）；EHESS（法国高等社会科学研究院）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；LIG（格勒诺布尔信息学实验室）；UGA（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；G-INP（格勒诺布尔国立理工学院）；KIT（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
This paper presents a high-quality multilingual dataset for the documentation domain to advance research on localization of structured text. Unlike widely-used datasets for translation of plain text, we collect XML-structured parallel text segments from the online documentation for an enterprise software platform. These Web pages have been professionally translated from English into 16 languages and maintained by domain experts, and around 100,000 text segments are available for each language pair. We build and evaluate translation models for seven target languages from English, with several d…
How Does Language Influence Documentation Workflow? Unsupervised Word Discovery Using Translations in Multiple Languages
Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble (LIG)（格勒诺布尔计算机实验室）；UGA（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；G-INP（格勒诺布尔国立理工学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；UFRGS（南里奥格兰德联邦大学）
对于语言文档举措，转录是一种昂贵的资源：一分钟的音频估计需要语言学家平均一个半小时的工作（Austin和Sallabank，2013年）。最近，在资源丰富的语言中收集对齐的翻译成为确保记录的事后可解释性的流行解决方案（Adda et al. 2016）。在本文中，我们调查语言相关的影响，在自动方法计算语言文档。我们将双语Mboshi-French平行语料库（Godard et al. 2017）翻译成其他四种语言，并执行双语根无监督单词发现。我们的研究结果暗示了资源丰富的语言对输出质量的影响。然而，通过结合不同双语模型学习到的信息，我们只能略微提高分割的质量。
This paper accompanies the software documentation data set for machine translation, a parallel evaluation data set of data originating from the SAP Help Portal, that we released to the machine translation community for research purposes. It offers the possibility to tune and evaluate machine translation systems in the domain of corporate software documentation and contributes to the availability of a wider range of evaluation scenarios. The data set comprises of the language pairs English to Hindi, Indonesian, Malay and Thai, and thus also increases the test coverage for the many low-resource …
Investigating Language Impact in Bilingual Approaches for Computational Language Documentation
Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble (LIG)（格勒诺布尔信息学实验室）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；Institute of Informatics (INF), UFRGS（南里奥格兰德联邦大学信息学研究所）
对于濒危语言，数据汇集活动必须适应其中许多来自口头传统的挑战，并且制作翻译是昂贵的。因此，必须将其翻译成广泛使用的语言，以确保录音的可解释性。在本文中，我们将探讨如何选择翻译语言的影响后的文档工作和潜在的自动方法，将工作在上面的双语语料库。为了回答这个问题，我们使用MaSS多语言语音语料库（Boito等人，2020）创建56个双语对，我们应用于低资源无监督分词和对齐的任务。我们的研究结果强调了翻译语言的选择影响了分词的性能，并且通过使用不同的对齐翻译来学习不同的词汇。最后，本文提出了一种用于双语分词的混合方法，结合从非参数贝叶斯模型（Goldwater et al.，2009 a）与Godard et al.（2018）的注意力分词神经模型。我们的研究结果表明，将这些线索纳入神经模型的输入表示中可以提高其翻译和对齐质量，特别是对于具有挑战性的语言对。
We present a new approach to perform zero-shot cross-modal transfer between speech and text for translation tasks. Multilingual speech and text are encoded in a joint fixed-size representation space. Then, we compare different approaches to decode these multimodal and multilingual fixed-size representations, enabling zero-shot translation between languages and modalities. All our models are trained without the need of cross-modal labeled translation data. Despite a fixed-size representation, we achieve very competitive results on several text and speech translation tasks. In particular, we sig…
Baidu Research（百度研究院）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）
Recently, representation learning for text and speech has successfully improved many language related tasks. However, all existing methods suffer from two limitations: (a) they only learn from one input modality, while a unified representation for both speech and text is needed by tasks such as end-to-end speech translation, and as a result,(b) they can not exploit various large-scale text and speech data and their performance is limited by the scarcity of parallel speech translation data.To address these problems, we propose a Fused Acoustic and Text Masked Language Model (FAT-MLM) which join…
Simultaneous text translation and end-to-end speech translation have recently made great progress but little work has combined these tasks together. We investigate how to adapt simultaneous text translation methods such as wait-k and monotonic multihead attention to end-to-end simultaneous speech translation by introducing a pre-decision module. A detailed analysis is provided on the latency-quality trade-offs of combining fixed and flexible pre-decision with fixed and flexible policies. We also design a novel computation-aware latency metric, adapted from Average Lagging.
