SimulSeamless: FBK at IWSLT 2024 Simultaneous Speech Translation

Sara Papi, Marco Gaido, Matteo Negri, Luisa Bentivogli


Abstract
This paper describes the FBK’s participation in the Simultaneous Translation Evaluation Campaign at IWSLT 2024. For this year’s submission in the speech-to-text translation (ST) sub-track, we propose SimulSeamless, which is realized by combining AlignAtt and SeamlessM4T in its medium configuration. The SeamlessM4T model is used ‘off-the-shelf’ and its simultaneous inference is enabled through the adoption of AlignAtt, a SimulST policy based on cross-attention that can be applied without any retraining or adaptation of the underlying model for the simultaneous task. We participated in all the Shared Task languages (English->German, Japanese, Chinese, and Czech->English), achieving acceptable or even better results compared to last year’s submissions. SimulSeamless, covering more than 143 source languages and 200 target languages, is released at: https://github.com/hlt-mt/FBK-fairseq/.
Anthology ID:
2024.iwslt-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand (in-person and online)
Editors:
Elizabeth Salesky, Marcello Federico, Marine Carpuat
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
72–79
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.iwslt-1.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.iwslt-1.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sara Papi, Marco Gaido, Matteo Negri, and Luisa Bentivogli. 2024. SimulSeamless: FBK at IWSLT 2024 Simultaneous Speech Translation. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2024), pages 72–79, Bangkok, Thailand (in-person and online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SimulSeamless: FBK at IWSLT 2024 Simultaneous Speech Translation (Papi et al., IWSLT 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.iwslt-1.11.pdf