Related papers: DUB: Discrete Unit Back-translation for Speech Tra…

Consistency regularization methods, such as R-Drop (Liang et al., 2021) and CrossConST (Gao et al., 2023), have achieved impressive supervised and zero-shot performance in the neural machine translation (NMT) field. Can we also boost…

While back-translation is simple and effective in exploiting abundant monolingual corpora to improve low-resource neural machine translation (NMT), the synthetic bilingual corpora generated by NMT models trained on limited authentic…

Structured State Spaces for Sequences (S4) is a recently proposed sequence model with successful applications in various tasks, e.g. vision, language modeling, and audio. Thanks to its mathematical formulation, it compresses its input to a…

Automatic Speech Understanding (ASU) aims at human-like speech interpretation, providing nuanced intent, emotion, sentiment, and content understanding from speech and language (text) content conveyed in speech. Typically, training a robust…

Building conversational speech recognition systems for new languages is constrained by the availability of utterances that capture user-device interactions. Data collection is both expensive and limited by the speed of manual transcription.…

Albeit great performance of Transformer-based speech selfsupervised learning (SSL) models, their large parameter size and computational cost make them unfavorable to utilize. In this study, we propose to compress the speech SSL models by…

Self-attention mechanisms have enabled transformers to achieve superhuman-level performance on many speech-to-text (STT) tasks, yet the challenge of automatic prosodic segmentation has remained unsolved. In this paper we finetune Whisper, a…

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) can be used to generate fluent output. As such, language models have been investigated for incorporation with NMT. In prior investigations, two models have been used: a translation model and a language…

We introduce DiffuseST, a low-latency, direct speech-to-speech translation system capable of preserving the input speaker's voice zero-shot while translating from multiple source languages into English. We experiment with the synthesizer…

Despite recent successes with neural models for sign language translation (SLT), translation quality still lags behind spoken languages because of the data scarcity and modality gap between sign video and text. To address both problems, we…

In a spoken dialogue system, an NLU model is preceded by a speech recognition system that can deteriorate the performance of natural language understanding. This paper proposes a method for investigating the impact of speech recognition…

Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), in which all components are trained jointly, is an attractive alternative to cascaded systems because it offers a simpler pipeline and lower inference latency. However, direct S2ST models require…

Language model pre-training has shown promising results in various downstream tasks. In this context, we introduce a cross-modal pre-trained language model, called Speech-Text BERT (ST-BERT), to tackle end-to-end spoken language…

End-to-end speech translation (ST), which translates source language speech directly into target language text, has garnered significant attention in recent years. Many ST applications require strict length control to ensure that the…

Soft Prompt Tuning (SPT) is a parameter-efficient method for adapting pre-trained language models (PLMs) to specific tasks by inserting learnable embeddings, or soft prompts, at the input layer of the PLM, without modifying its parameters.…

This work investigates a simple data augmentation technique, SpecAugment, for end-to-end speech translation. SpecAugment is a low-cost implementation method applied directly to the audio input features and it consists of masking blocks of…

We explore the use of segments learnt using Byte Pair Encoding (referred to as BPE units) as basic units for statistical machine translation between related languages and compare it with orthographic syllables, which are currently the best…

Speech-to-text translation (ST) is a cross-modal task that involves converting spoken language into text in a different language. Previous research primarily focused on enhancing speech translation by facilitating knowledge transfer from…

Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) converts input speech to speech in another language. A challenge of delivering S2ST in real time is the accumulated delay between the translation and speech synthesis modules. While recently incremental…

End-to-End Speech Translation (E2E-ST) has seen significant advancements, yet current models are primarily benchmarked on curated, "clean" datasets. This overlooks critical real-world challenges, such as morphological robustness to…