Towards Real-World Streaming Speech Translation for Code-Switched Speech

Belen Alastruey, Matthias Sperber, Christian Gollan, Dominic C Telaar, Tim Ng, Aashish Agarwal

Keywords: Speech translation, code switching, streaming models

TL;DR: We investigate speech translation of code-switched speech into a third language, under streaming conditions, and release a corresponding dataset.

Abstract:

Code-switching (CS), i.e. mixing different languages in a single sentence, is a common phenomenon in communication and can be challenging in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) settings. Previous studies on CS speech have shown promising results for end-to-end speech translation (ST), but have been limited to offline scenarios and to translation to one of the languages present in the source monolingual transcription).

In this paper, we focus on two essential yet unexplored areas for real-world CS speech translation: streaming settings, and translation to a third language (i.e., a language not included in the source). To this end, we extend the Fisher and Miami test and validation datasets to include new targets in Spanish and German. Using this data, we train a model for both offline and streaming ST and we establish baseline results for the two settings mentioned earlier.

Submission Type: Regular Long Paper(8 pages)

Submission Number: 3