We created a collection of speech data for 48 low resource languages. The corpus is extracted from radio broadcasts and processed with novel speech detection and language identification models based on a manually vetted subset of the audio for 10 languages. The data is made publicly available.

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.

Research in toxicity detection in natural language processing for the speech modality (audio-based) is quite limited, particularly for languages other than English. To address these limitations and lay the groundwork for truly multilingual audio-based toxicity detection, we introduce MuTox, the first highly multilingual audio-based dataset with toxicity labels which covers 14 different linguistic families. The dataset comprises 20,000 audio utterances for English and Spanish, and 4,000 for the other 28 languages. To demonstrate the quality of this dataset, we trained the MuTox audio-based toxicity classifier, which enables zero-shot toxicity detection across a wide range of languages. This classifier performs on par with existing text-based trainable classifiers, while expanding the language coverage more than tenfold. When compared to a wordlist-based classifier that covers a similar number of languages, MuTox improves F1-Score by an average of 100%. This significant improvement underscores the potential of MuTox in advancing the field of audio-based toxicity detection.

End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we propose a text-free evaluation metric for end-to-end S2ST, named BLASER, to avoid the dependency on ASR systems. BLASER leverages a multilingual multimodal encoder to directly encode the speech segments for source input, translation output and reference into a shared embedding space and computes a score of the translation quality that can be used as a proxy to human evaluation. To evaluate our approach, we construct training and evaluation sets from more than 40k human annotations covering seven language directions. The best results of BLASER are achieved by training with supervision from human rating scores. We show that when evaluated at the sentence level, BLASER correlates significantly better with human judgment compared to ASR dependent metrics including ASR-SENTBLEU in all translation directions and ASR-COMET in five of them. Our analysis shows combining speech and text as inputs to BLASER does not increase the correlation with human scores, but best correlations are achieved when using speech, which motivates the goal of our research. Moreover, we show that using ASR for references is detrimental for text-based metrics.

We introduce a new proxy score for evaluating bitext mining based on similarity in a multilingual embedding space: xsim++. In comparison to xsim, this improved proxy leverages rule-based approaches to extend English sentences in any evaluation set with synthetic, hard-to-distinguish examples which more closely mirror the scenarios we encounter during large-scale mining. We validate this proxy by running a significant number of bitext mining experiments for a set of low-resource languages, and subsequently train NMT systems on the mined data. In comparison to xsim, we show that xsim++ is better correlated with the downstream BLEU scores of translation systems trained on mined bitexts, providing a reliable proxy of bitext mining performance without needing to run expensive bitext mining pipelines. xsim++ also reports performance for different error types, offering more fine-grained feedbacks for model development.

Neural machine translation, as other natural language deep learning applications, is hungry for data. As research evolves, the data pipelines supporting that research evolve too, oftentimes re-implementing the same core components. Despite the potential of modular codebases, researchers have but little time to put code structure and reusability first. Unfortunately, this makes it very hard to publish clean, reproducible code to benefit a wider audience. In this paper, we motivate and describe stopes , a framework that addresses these issues while empowering scalability and versatility for research use cases. This library was a key enabler of the No Language Left Behind project, establishing new state of the art performance for a multilingual machine translation model covering 200 languages. stopes and the pipelines described are released under the MIT license at https://github.com/facebookresearch/stopes.

We present the results of the WMT’22 SharedTask on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. The shared taskincluded both a data and a systems track, alongwith additional innovations, such as a focus onAfrican languages and extensive human evaluation of submitted systems. We received 14system submissions from 8 teams, as well as6 data track contributions. We report a largeprogress in the quality of translation for Africanlanguages since the last iteration of this sharedtask: there is an increase of about 7.5 BLEUpoints across 72 language pairs, and the average BLEU scores went from 15.09 to 22.60.