Pushing the Limits of Zero-shot End-to-End Speech Translation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tsiamas, Ioannis, Gállego, Gerard I., Fonollosa, José A. R., Costa-jussà, Marta R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916276447739904
author Tsiamas, Ioannis
Gállego, Gerard I.
Fonollosa, José A. R.
Costa-jussà, Marta R.
author_facet Tsiamas, Ioannis
Gállego, Gerard I.
Fonollosa, José A. R.
Costa-jussà, Marta R.
contents Data scarcity and the modality gap between the speech and text modalities are two major obstacles of end-to-end Speech Translation (ST) systems, thus hindering their performance. Prior work has attempted to mitigate these challenges by leveraging external MT data and optimizing distance metrics that bring closer the speech-text representations. However, achieving competitive results typically requires some ST data. For this reason, we introduce ZeroSwot, a method for zero-shot ST that bridges the modality gap without any paired ST data. Leveraging a novel CTC compression and Optimal Transport, we train a speech encoder using only ASR data, to align with the representation space of a massively multilingual MT model. The speech encoder seamlessly integrates with the MT model at inference, enabling direct translation from speech to text, across all languages supported by the MT model. Our experiments show that we can effectively close the modality gap without ST data, while our results on MuST-C and CoVoST demonstrate our method's superiority over not only previous zero-shot models, but also supervised ones, achieving state-of-the-art results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_10422
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pushing the Limits of Zero-shot End-to-End Speech Translation
Tsiamas, Ioannis
Gállego, Gerard I.
Fonollosa, José A. R.
Costa-jussà, Marta R.
Computation and Language
Data scarcity and the modality gap between the speech and text modalities are two major obstacles of end-to-end Speech Translation (ST) systems, thus hindering their performance. Prior work has attempted to mitigate these challenges by leveraging external MT data and optimizing distance metrics that bring closer the speech-text representations. However, achieving competitive results typically requires some ST data. For this reason, we introduce ZeroSwot, a method for zero-shot ST that bridges the modality gap without any paired ST data. Leveraging a novel CTC compression and Optimal Transport, we train a speech encoder using only ASR data, to align with the representation space of a massively multilingual MT model. The speech encoder seamlessly integrates with the MT model at inference, enabling direct translation from speech to text, across all languages supported by the MT model. Our experiments show that we can effectively close the modality gap without ST data, while our results on MuST-C and CoVoST demonstrate our method's superiority over not only previous zero-shot models, but also supervised ones, achieving state-of-the-art results.
title Pushing the Limits of Zero-shot End-to-End Speech Translation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10422