Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Speech Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ma, Rao, Qian, Mengjie, Fathullah, Yassir, Tang, Siyuan, Gales, Mark, Knill, Kate
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Ma, Rao
Qian, Mengjie
Fathullah, Yassir
Tang, Siyuan
Gales, Mark
Knill, Kate
author_facet Ma, Rao
Qian, Mengjie
Fathullah, Yassir
Tang, Siyuan
Gales, Mark
Knill, Kate
contents There has been increasing interest in building multilingual foundation models for NLP and speech research. This paper examines how to expand the speech translation capability of these models with restricted data. Whisper, a speech foundation model with strong performance on speech recognition and English translation, is used as the example model. Using speech-to-speech retrieval to analyse the audio representations generated by the encoder, we show that utterances from different languages are mapped to a shared semantic space. This shared embedding space can then be leveraged for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in speech translation. By fine-tuning the Whisper decoder with only English-to-Chinese speech translation data, improved performance for translation to Chinese can be obtained for multiple languages, in addition to English. Furthermore, for languages related to those seen in training it is possible to perform speech translation, despite the model never seeing the language in training, or being able to perform transcription.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_01130
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Speech Translation
Ma, Rao
Qian, Mengjie
Fathullah, Yassir
Tang, Siyuan
Gales, Mark
Knill, Kate
Computation and Language
There has been increasing interest in building multilingual foundation models for NLP and speech research. This paper examines how to expand the speech translation capability of these models with restricted data. Whisper, a speech foundation model with strong performance on speech recognition and English translation, is used as the example model. Using speech-to-speech retrieval to analyse the audio representations generated by the encoder, we show that utterances from different languages are mapped to a shared semantic space. This shared embedding space can then be leveraged for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in speech translation. By fine-tuning the Whisper decoder with only English-to-Chinese speech translation data, improved performance for translation to Chinese can be obtained for multiple languages, in addition to English. Furthermore, for languages related to those seen in training it is possible to perform speech translation, despite the model never seeing the language in training, or being able to perform transcription.
title Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Speech Translation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01130