Back Translation for Speech-to-text Translation Without Transcripts

Qingkai Fang, Yang Feng


Abstract
The success of end-to-end speech-to-text translation (ST) is often achieved by utilizing source transcripts, e.g., by pre-training with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) tasks, or by introducing additional ASR and MT data. Unfortunately, transcripts are only sometimes available since numerous unwritten languages exist worldwide. In this paper, we aim to utilize large amounts of target-side monolingual data to enhance ST without transcripts. Motivated by the remarkable success of back translation in MT, we develop a back translation algorithm for ST (BT4ST) to synthesize pseudo ST data from monolingual target data. To ease the challenges posed by short-to-long generation and one-to-many mapping, we introduce self-supervised discrete units and achieve back translation by cascading a target-to-unit model and a unit-to-speech model. With our synthetic ST data, we achieve an average boost of 2.3 BLEU on MuST-C En-De, En-Fr, and En-Es datasets. More experiments show that our method is especially effective in low-resource scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.251
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4567–4587
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.251
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.251
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qingkai Fang and Yang Feng. 2023. Back Translation for Speech-to-text Translation Without Transcripts. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4567–4587, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Back Translation for Speech-to-text Translation Without Transcripts (Fang & Feng, ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.251.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.251.mp4