Speech-to-Speech Translation with Discrete-Unit-Based Style Transfer

Yongqi Wang, Bai Jionghao, Rongjie Huang, Ruiqi Li, Zhiqing Hong, Zhou Zhao


Abstract
Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) with discrete self-supervised representations has achieved remarkable accuracy, but is unable to preserve the speaker timbre of the source speech. Meanwhile, the scarcity of high-quality speaker-parallel data poses a challenge for learning style transfer during translation. We design an S2ST pipeline with style-transfer capability on the basis of discrete self-supervised speech representations and codec units. The acoustic language model we introduce for style transfer leverages self-supervised in-context learning, acquiring style transfer ability without relying on any speaker-parallel data, thereby overcoming data scarcity. By using extensive training data, our model achieves zero-shot cross-lingual style transfer on previously unseen source languages. Experiments show that our model generates translated speeches with high fidelity and speaker similarity. Audio samples are available at http://stylelm.github.io/ .
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-srw.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Xiyan Fu, Eve Fleisig
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
42–49
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yongqi Wang, Bai Jionghao, Rongjie Huang, Ruiqi Li, Zhiqing Hong, and Zhou Zhao. 2024. Speech-to-Speech Translation with Discrete-Unit-Based Style Transfer. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 42–49, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Speech-to-Speech Translation with Discrete-Unit-Based Style Transfer (Wang et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.5.pdf