Florentin Barbier


2022

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Speech Resources in the Tamasheq Language
Marcely Zanon Boito | Fethi Bougares | Florentin Barbier | Souhir Gahbiche | Loïc Barrault | Mickael Rouvier | Yannick Estève
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In this paper we present two datasets for Tamasheq, a developing language mainly spoken in Mali and Niger. These two datasets were made available for the IWSLT 2022 low-resource speech translation track, and they consist of collections of radio recordings from daily broadcast news in Niger (Studio Kalangou) and Mali (Studio Tamani). We share (i) a massive amount of unlabeled audio data (671 hours) in five languages: French from Niger, Fulfulde, Hausa, Tamasheq and Zarma, and (ii) a smaller 17 hours parallel corpus of audio recordings in Tamasheq, with utterance-level translations in the French language. All this data is shared under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. We hope these resources will inspire the speech community to develop and benchmark models using the Tamasheq language.

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ON-TRAC Consortium Systems for the IWSLT 2022 Dialect and Low-resource Speech Translation Tasks
Marcely Zanon Boito | John Ortega | Hugo Riguidel | Antoine Laurent | Loïc Barrault | Fethi Bougares | Firas Chaabani | Ha Nguyen | Florentin Barbier | Souhir Gahbiche | Yannick Estève
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2022)

This paper describes the ON-TRAC Consortium translation systems developed for two challenge tracks featured in the Evaluation Campaign of IWSLT 2022: low-resource and dialect speech translation. For the Tunisian Arabic-English dataset (low-resource and dialect tracks), we build an end-to-end model as our joint primary submission, and compare it against cascaded models that leverage a large fine-tuned wav2vec 2.0 model for ASR. Our results show that in our settings pipeline approaches are still very competitive, and that with the use of transfer learning, they can outperform end-to-end models for speech translation (ST). For the Tamasheq-French dataset (low-resource track) our primary submission leverages intermediate representations from a wav2vec 2.0 model trained on 234 hours of Tamasheq audio, while our contrastive model uses a French phonetic transcription of the Tamasheq audio as input in a Conformer speech translation architecture jointly trained on automatic speech recognition, ST and machine translation losses. Our results highlight that self-supervised models trained on smaller sets of target data are more effective to low-resource end-to-end ST fine-tuning, compared to large off-the-shelf models. Results also illustrate that even approximate phonetic transcriptions can improve ST scores.

2021

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ON-TRAC’ systems for the IWSLT 2021 low-resource speech translation and multilingual speech translation shared tasks
Hang Le | Florentin Barbier | Ha Nguyen | Natalia Tomashenko | Salima Mdhaffar | Souhir Gabiche Gahbiche | Benjamin Lecouteux | Didier Schwab | Yannick Estève
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2021)

This paper describes the ON-TRAC Consortium translation systems developed for two challenge tracks featured in the Evaluation Campaign of IWSLT 2021, low-resource speech translation and multilingual speech translation. The ON-TRAC Consortium is composed of researchers from three French academic laboratories and an industrial partner: LIA (Avignon Université), LIG (Université Grenoble Alpes), LIUM (Le Mans Université), and researchers from Airbus. A pipeline approach was explored for the low-resource speech translation task, using a hybrid HMM/TDNN automatic speech recognition system fed by wav2vec features, coupled to an NMT system. For the multilingual speech translation task, we investigated the us of a dual-decoder Transformer that jointly transcribes and translates an input speech. This model was trained in order to translate from multiple source languages to multiple target ones.