@inproceedings{heffernan-etal-2024-aligning,
title = "Aligning Speech Segments Beyond Pure Semantics",
author = "Heffernan, Kevin and
Kozhevnikov, Artyom and
Barrault, Loic and
Mourachko, Alexandre and
Schwenk, Holger",
editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei and
Martins, Andre and
Srikumar, Vivek",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024",
month = aug,
year = "2024",
address = "Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.216",
pages = "3626--3635",
abstract = "Multilingual parallel data for speech-to-speech translation is scarce and expensive to create from scratch. This is all the more true for expressive speech translation, which aims at preserving not only the semantics, but also the overall prosody (e.g. style, emotion, rate-of-speech). Existing corpora contain speech utterances with the same meaning, yet the overall prosody is typically different, as human annotators are not tasked with reproducing these aspects, or crowed-sourced efforts do not specifically target this kind of alignment in priority. In this paper, we propose a novel alignment algorithm, which automatically forms pairs of speech segments aligned not only in meaning, but also in expressivity. In order to validate our approach, we train an expressive multilingual speech-to-speech translation system on the automatically aligned data. Our experiments show that in comparison to semantic-only approaches, expressively aligned data yields large improvements in source expressivity preservation (e.g. 43{\%} uplift in speech rate preservation on average), while still maintaining content translation quality. In some scenarios, results also indicate that this alignment algorithm can outperform standard, semantic-focused approaches even on content translation quality.",
}
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<abstract>Multilingual parallel data for speech-to-speech translation is scarce and expensive to create from scratch. This is all the more true for expressive speech translation, which aims at preserving not only the semantics, but also the overall prosody (e.g. style, emotion, rate-of-speech). Existing corpora contain speech utterances with the same meaning, yet the overall prosody is typically different, as human annotators are not tasked with reproducing these aspects, or crowed-sourced efforts do not specifically target this kind of alignment in priority. In this paper, we propose a novel alignment algorithm, which automatically forms pairs of speech segments aligned not only in meaning, but also in expressivity. In order to validate our approach, we train an expressive multilingual speech-to-speech translation system on the automatically aligned data. Our experiments show that in comparison to semantic-only approaches, expressively aligned data yields large improvements in source expressivity preservation (e.g. 43% uplift in speech rate preservation on average), while still maintaining content translation quality. In some scenarios, results also indicate that this alignment algorithm can outperform standard, semantic-focused approaches even on content translation quality.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Aligning Speech Segments Beyond Pure Semantics
%A Heffernan, Kevin
%A Kozhevnikov, Artyom
%A Barrault, Loic
%A Mourachko, Alexandre
%A Schwenk, Holger
%Y Ku, Lun-Wei
%Y Martins, Andre
%Y Srikumar, Vivek
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
%D 2024
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
%F heffernan-etal-2024-aligning
%X Multilingual parallel data for speech-to-speech translation is scarce and expensive to create from scratch. This is all the more true for expressive speech translation, which aims at preserving not only the semantics, but also the overall prosody (e.g. style, emotion, rate-of-speech). Existing corpora contain speech utterances with the same meaning, yet the overall prosody is typically different, as human annotators are not tasked with reproducing these aspects, or crowed-sourced efforts do not specifically target this kind of alignment in priority. In this paper, we propose a novel alignment algorithm, which automatically forms pairs of speech segments aligned not only in meaning, but also in expressivity. In order to validate our approach, we train an expressive multilingual speech-to-speech translation system on the automatically aligned data. Our experiments show that in comparison to semantic-only approaches, expressively aligned data yields large improvements in source expressivity preservation (e.g. 43% uplift in speech rate preservation on average), while still maintaining content translation quality. In some scenarios, results also indicate that this alignment algorithm can outperform standard, semantic-focused approaches even on content translation quality.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.216
%P 3626-3635
Markdown (Informal)
[Aligning Speech Segments Beyond Pure Semantics](https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.216) (Heffernan et al., Findings 2024)
ACL
- Kevin Heffernan, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Loic Barrault, Alexandre Mourachko, and Holger Schwenk. 2024. Aligning Speech Segments Beyond Pure Semantics. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 3626–3635, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.