End-to-End Speech-Translation with Knowledge Distillation: FBK@IWSLT2020

Marco Gaido, Mattia A. Di Gangi, Matteo Negri, Marco Turchi


Abstract
This paper describes FBK’s participation in the IWSLT 2020 offline speech translation (ST) task. The task evaluates systems’ ability to translate English TED talks audio into German texts. The test talks are provided in two versions: one contains the data already segmented with automatic tools and the other is the raw data without any segmentation. Participants can decide whether to work on custom segmentation or not. We used the provided segmentation. Our system is an end-to-end model based on an adaptation of the Transformer for speech data. Its training process is the main focus of this paper and it is based on: i) transfer learning (ASR pretraining and knowledge distillation), ii) data augmentation (SpecAugment, time stretch and synthetic data), iii)combining synthetic and real data marked as different domains, and iv) multi-task learning using the CTC loss. Finally, after the training with word-level knowledge distillation is complete, our ST models are fine-tuned using label smoothed cross entropy. Our best model scored 29 BLEU on the MuST-CEn-De test set, which is an excellent result compared to recent papers, and 23.7 BLEU on the same data segmented with VAD, showing the need for researching solutions addressing this specific data condition.
Anthology ID:
2020.iwslt-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Marcello Federico, Alex Waibel, Kevin Knight, Satoshi Nakamura, Hermann Ney, Jan Niehues, Sebastian Stüker, Dekai Wu, Joseph Mariani, Francois Yvon
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
80–88
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.iwslt-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.iwslt-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marco Gaido, Mattia A. Di Gangi, Matteo Negri, and Marco Turchi. 2020. End-to-End Speech-Translation with Knowledge Distillation: FBK@IWSLT2020. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation, pages 80–88, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
End-to-End Speech-Translation with Knowledge Distillation: FBK@IWSLT2020 (Gaido et al., IWSLT 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.iwslt-1.8.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929598
Data
Europarl-STLibriSpeech