Related papers: Bemba Speech Translation: Exploring a Low-Resource…

Multilingual transformer models like mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa have obtained great improvements for many NLP tasks on a variety of languages. However, recent works also showed that results from high-resource languages could not be easily…

We present a preprocessed, ready-to-use automatic speech recognition corpus, BembaSpeech, consisting over 24 hours of read speech in the Bemba language, a written but low-resourced language spoken by over 30% of the population in Zambia. To…

Pre-trained language models have revolutionized the natural language understanding landscape, most notably BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). However, a significant challenge remains for low-resource languages,…

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for low-resource languages is still a challenging task in front of NLP researchers. In this work, we deploy a standard data augmentation methodology by back-translation to a new language translation…

We present BIG-C (Bemba Image Grounded Conversations), a large multimodal dataset for Bemba. While Bemba is the most populous language of Zambia, it exhibits a dearth of resources which render the development of language technologies or…

This paper describes the submission to the IWSLT 2021 offline speech translation task by the UPC Machine Translation group. The task consists of building a system capable of translating English audio recordings extracted from TED talks into…

In this study, we develop Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Transformer-based transfer learning models for English-to-Igbo translation - a low-resource African language spoken by over 40 million people across Nigeria and West Africa. Our…

Despite remarkable advances in natural language processing, developing effective systems for low-resource languages remains a formidable challenge, with performances typically lagging far behind high-resource counterparts due to data…

In this paper, we introduce the first publicly available English-Kpelle dataset for machine translation, comprising over 2000 sentence pairs drawn from everyday communication, religious texts, and educational materials. By fine-tuning…

Modern speech synthesis techniques can produce natural-sounding speech given sufficient high-quality data and compute resources. However, such data is not readily available for many languages. This paper focuses on speech synthesis for…

Multi-lingual contextualized embeddings, such as multilingual-BERT (mBERT), have shown success in a variety of zero-shot cross-lingual tasks. However, these models are limited by having inconsistent contextualized representations of…

For many low-resource languages, spoken language resources are more likely to be annotated with translations than with transcriptions. Translated speech data is potentially valuable for documenting endangered languages or for training…

This paper introduces BnTTS (Bangla Text-To-Speech), the first framework for Bangla speaker adaptation-based TTS, designed to bridge the gap in Bangla speech synthesis using minimal training data. Building upon the XTTS architecture, our…

This paper explores the idea of using phonemes as a textual representation within a conventional multilingual simultaneous speech-to-speech translation pipeline, as opposed to the traditional reliance on text-based language representations.…

An effective method to improve neural machine translation with monolingual data is to augment the parallel training corpus with back-translations of target language sentences. This work broadens the understanding of back-translation and…

Speech technologies are transforming interactions across various sectors, from healthcare to call centers and robots, yet their performance on African-accented conversations remains underexplored. We introduce Afrispeech-Dialog, a benchmark…

Spoken conversational agents are converging toward voice-native LLMs. This tutorial distills the path from cascaded ASR/NLU to end-to-end, retrieval-and vision-grounded systems. We frame adaptation of text LLMs to audio, cross-modal…

When building state-of-the-art speech translation models, the need for large computational resources is a significant obstacle due to the large training data size and complex models. The availability of pre-trained models is a promising…

In this paper, we describe our end-to-end multilingual speech translation system submitted to the IWSLT 2021 evaluation campaign on the Multilingual Speech Translation shared task. Our system is built by leveraging transfer learning across…

This paper describes the University of Sydney& JD's joint submission of the IWSLT 2021 low resource speech translation task. We participated in the Swahili-English direction and got the best scareBLEU (25.3) score among all the…