English

Bemba Speech Translation: Exploring a Low-Resource African Language

Computation and Language 2025-08-14 v3 Sound Audio and Speech Processing
Authors: Muhammad Hazim Al Farouq , Aman Kassahun Wassie , Yasmin Moslem
View on arXiv ↗ PDF ↗ DOI ↗

Abstract

This paper describes our system submission to the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2025), low-resource languages track, namely for Bemba-to-English speech translation. We built cascaded speech translation systems based on Whisper and NLLB-200, and employed data augmentation techniques, such as back-translation. We investigate the effect of using synthetic data and discuss our experimental setup.

Keywords

speech translation machine translation speech recognition

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.02518,
  title  = {Bemba Speech Translation: Exploring a Low-Resource African Language},
  author = {Muhammad Hazim Al Farouq and Aman Kassahun Wassie and Yasmin Moslem},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.02518},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

IWSLT 2025

Related papers

View all related →
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Leveraging Synthetic Audio Data for End-to-End Low-Resource Speech Translation
Yasmin Moslem
2024-06-28
Computation and Language · Computer Science
KIT's Low-resource Speech Translation Systems for IWSLT2025: System Enhancement with Synthetic Data and Model Regularization
Zhaolin Li, Yining Liu, Danni Liu, Tuan Nam Nguyen +5
2026-01-29
Computation and Language · Computer Science
KIT's Multilingual Speech Translation System for IWSLT 2023
Danni Liu, Thai Binh Nguyen, Sai Koneru, Enes Yavuz Ugan +6
2023-07-13
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Dealing with the Hard Facts of Low-Resource African NLP
Yacouba Diarra, Nouhoum Souleymane Coulibaly, Panga Azazia Kamaté, Madani Amadou Tall +3
2025-11-25
Sound · Computer Science
NaijaS2ST: A Multi-Accent Benchmark for Speech-to-Speech Translation in Low-Resource Nigerian Languages
Marie Maltais, Yejin Jeon, Min Ma, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad +6
2026-04-20
Computation and Language · Computer Science
IMS' Systems for the IWSLT 2021 Low-Resource Speech Translation Task
Pavel Denisov, Manuel Mager, Ngoc Thang Vu
2021-07-01
Computation and Language · Computer Science
BanglaEmbed: Efficient Sentence Embedding Models for a Low-Resource Language Using Cross-Lingual Distillation Techniques
Muhammad Rafsan Kabir, Md. Mohibur Rahman Nabil, Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman Khan
2024-11-26
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Data Augmentation With Back translation for Low Resource languages: A case of English and Luganda
Richard Kimera, Dongnyeong Heo, Daniela N. Rim, Heeyoul Choi
2025-05-06
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Speech Translation
Rao Ma, Mengjie Qian, Yassir Fathullah, Siyuan Tang +2
2025-02-12
Computation and Language · Computer Science
NAVER LABS Europe's Multilingual Speech Translation Systems for the IWSLT 2023 Low-Resource Track
Edward Gow-Smith, Alexandre Berard, Marcely Zanon Boito, Ioan Calapodescu
2023-06-14
Computation and Language · Computer Science
BeaverTalk: Oregon State University's IWSLT 2025 Simultaneous Speech Translation System
Matthew Raffel, Victor Agostinelli, Lizhong Chen
2025-06-02
Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems
Textless Streaming Speech-to-Speech Translation using Semantic Speech Tokens
Jinzheng Zhao, Niko Moritz, Egor Lakomkin, Ruiming Xie +6
2024-10-07
Computation and Language · Computer Science
ON-TRAC Consortium Systems for the IWSLT 2022 Dialect and Low-resource Speech Translation Tasks
Marcely Zanon Boito, John Ortega, Hugo Riguidel, Antoine Laurent +7
2022-05-05
Computation and Language · Computer Science
A Data Selection Approach for Enhancing Low Resource Machine Translation Using Cross-Lingual Sentence Representations
Nidhi Kowtal, Tejas Deshpande, Raviraj Joshi
2024-09-05
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Low-Resource Speech-to-Text Translation
Sameer Bansal, Herman Kamper, Karen Livescu, Adam Lopez +1
2018-06-19
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Towards Speech Dialogue Translation Mediating Speakers of Different Languages
Shuichiro Shimizu, Chenhui Chu, Sheng Li, Sadao Kurohashi
2023-05-23
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Back-translation for Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation
Baohao Liao, Shahram Khadivi, Sanjika Hewavitharana
2021-09-21
Computation and Language · Computer Science
The ADAPT System Description for the IWSLT 2018 Basque to English Translation Task
Alberto Poncelas, Andy Way, Kepa Sarasola
2018-11-15
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Simultaneous Translation with Offline Speech and LLM Models in CUNI Submission to IWSLT 2025
Dominik Macháček, Peter Polák
2025-06-23
Computation and Language · Computer Science
IIITH-BUT system for IWSLT 2025 low-resource Bhojpuri to Hindi speech translation
Bhavana Akkiraju, Aishwarya Pothula, Santosh Kesiraju, Anil Kumar Vuppala
2025-06-06
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Transfer Learning and Distant Supervision for Multilingual Transformer Models: A Study on African Languages
Michael A. Hedderich, David Adelani, Dawei Zhu, Jesujoba Alabi +2
2020-10-08
Computation and Language · Computer Science
BembaSpeech: A Speech Recognition Corpus for the Bemba Language
Claytone Sikasote, Antonios Anastasopoulos
2021-02-10
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Transferring BERT Capabilities from High-Resource to Low-Resource Languages Using Vocabulary Matching
Piotr Rybak
2024-02-23
Computation and Language · Computer Science
CantonMT: Cantonese to English NMT Platform with Fine-Tuned Models Using Synthetic Back-Translation Data
Kung Yin Hong, Lifeng Han, Riza Batista-Navarro, Goran Nenadic
2024-06-11
Computation and Language · Computer Science
BIG-C: a Multimodal Multi-Purpose Dataset for Bemba
Claytone Sikasote, Eunice Mukonde, Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam, Antonios Anastasopoulos
2023-05-30
R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:21:17.233Z