2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper IDHLT-7.2
Paper Title CASCADED MODELS WITH CYCLIC FEEDBACK FOR DIRECT SPEECH TRANSLATION
Authors Tsz Kin Lam, Shigehiko Schamoni, Stefan Riezler, Heidelberg University, Germany
SessionHLT-7: Speech Translation 1: Models
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Wednesday, 09 June, 14:00 - 14:45
Presentation Time:Wednesday, 09 June, 14:00 - 14:45
Presentation Poster
Topic Human Language Technology: [HLT-MTSW] Machine Translation for Spoken and Written Language
IEEE Xplore Open Preview  Click here to view in IEEE Xplore
Virtual Presentation  Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference
Abstract Direct speech translation describes a scenario where only speech inputs and corresponding translations are available. Such data are notoriously limited. We present a technique that allows cascades of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) to exploit in-domain direct speech translation data in addition to out-of-domain MT and ASR data. After pre-training MT and ASR, we use a feedback cycle where the downstream performance of the MT system is used as a signal to improve the ASR system by self-training, and the MT component is fine-tuned on multiple ASR outputs, making it more tolerant towards spelling variations. A comparison to end-to-end speech translation using components of identical architecture and the same data shows gains of up to 3.8 BLEU points on LibriVoxDeEn and up to 5.1 BLEU points on CoVoST for German-to-English speech translation.