A Semi-Automated Live Interlingual Communication Workflow Featuring Intralingual Respeaking: Evaluation and Benchmarking

Tomasz Korybski, Elena Davitti, Constantin Orasan, Sabine Braun


Abstract
In this paper, we present a semi-automated workflow for live interlingual speech-to-text communication which seeks to reduce the shortcomings of existing ASR systems: a human respeaker works with a speaker-dependent speech recognition software (e.g., Dragon Naturally Speaking) to deliver punctuated same-language output of superior quality than obtained using out-of-the-box automatic speech recognition of the original speech. This is fed into a machine translation engine (the EU’s eTranslation) to produce live-caption ready text. We benchmark the quality of the output against the output of best-in-class (human) simultaneous interpreters working with the same source speeches from plenary sessions of the European Parliament. To evaluate the accuracy and facilitate the comparison between the two types of output, we use a tailored annotation approach based on the NTR model (Romero-Fresco and Pöchhacker, 2017). We find that the semi-automated workflow combining intralingual respeaking and machine translation is capable of generating outputs that are similar in terms of accuracy and completeness to the outputs produced in the benchmarking workflow, although the small scale of our experiment requires caution in interpreting this result.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.468
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4405–4413
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.468
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tomasz Korybski, Elena Davitti, Constantin Orasan, and Sabine Braun. 2022. A Semi-Automated Live Interlingual Communication Workflow Featuring Intralingual Respeaking: Evaluation and Benchmarking. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4405–4413, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
A Semi-Automated Live Interlingual Communication Workflow Featuring Intralingual Respeaking: Evaluation and Benchmarking (Korybski et al., LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.468.pdf