CVSS Corpus and Massively Multilingual Speech-to-Speech Translation

Ye Jia, Michelle Tadmor Ramanovich, Quan Wang, Heiga Zen


Abstract
We introduce CVSS, a massively multilingual-to-English speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) corpus, covering sentence-level parallel S2ST pairs from 21 languages into English. CVSS is derived from the Common Voice speech corpus and the CoVoST 2 speech-to-text translation (ST) corpus, by synthesizing the translation text from CoVoST 2 into speech using state-of-the-art TTS systems. Two versions of translation speech in English are provided: 1) CVSS-C: All the translation speech is in a single high-quality canonical voice; 2) CVSS-T: The translation speech is in voices transferred from the corresponding source speech. In addition, CVSS provides normalized translation text which matches the pronunciation in the translation speech. On each version of CVSS, we built baseline multilingual direct S2ST models and cascade S2ST models, verifying the effectiveness of the corpus. To build strong cascade S2ST baselines, we trained an ST model on CoVoST 2, which outperforms the previous state-of-the-art trained on the corpus without extra data by 5.8 BLEU. Nevertheless, the performance of the direct S2ST models approaches the strong cascade baselines when trained from scratch, and with only 0.1 or 0.7 BLEU difference on ASR transcribed translation when initialized from matching ST models.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.720
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:
6691–6703
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.720
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ye Jia, Michelle Tadmor Ramanovich, Quan Wang, and Heiga Zen. 2022. CVSS Corpus and Massively Multilingual Speech-to-Speech Translation. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6691–6703, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
CVSS Corpus and Massively Multilingual Speech-to-Speech Translation (Jia et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.720.pdf
Code
 google-research-datasets/cvss
Data
CVSSCoVoSTCommon VoiceLibriTTS