This paper describes NAIST’s submission to the simultaneous track of the IWSLT 2024 Evaluation Campaign: English-to-German, Japanese, Chinese speech-to-text translation and English-to-Japanese speech-to-speech translation. We develop a multilingual end-to-end speech-to-text translation model combining two pre-trained language models, HuBERT and mBART. We trained this model with two decoding policies, Local Agreement (LA) and AlignAtt. The submitted models employ the LA policy because it outperformed the AlignAtt policy in previous models. Our speech-to-speech translation method is a cascade of the above speech-to-text model and an incremental text-to-speech (TTS) module that incorporates a phoneme estimation model, a parallel acoustic model, and a parallel WaveGAN vocoder. We improved our incremental TTS by applying the Transformer architecture with the AlignAtt policy for the estimation model. The results show that our upgraded TTS module contributed to improving the system performance.

This paper analyzes the features of monotonic translations, which follow the word order of the source language, in simultaneous interpreting (SI). Word order differences are one of the biggest challenges in SI, especially for language pairs with significant structural differences like English and Japanese. We analyzed the characteristics of chunk-wise monotonic translation (CMT) sentences using the NAIST English-to-Japanese Chunk-wise Monotonic Translation Evaluation Dataset and identified some grammatical structures that make monotonic translation difficult in English-Japanese SI. We further investigated the features of CMT sentences by evaluating the output from the existing speech translation (ST) and simultaneous speech translation (simulST) models on the NAIST English-to-Japanese Chunk-wise Monotonic Translation Evaluation Dataset as well as on existing test sets. The results indicate the possibility that the existing SI-based test set underestimates the model performance. The results also suggest that using CMT sentences as references gives higher scores to simulST models than ST models, and that using an offline-based test set to evaluate the simulST models underestimates the model performance.

This study examines the effect of grammatical features in automatic essay scoring (AES). We use two kinds of grammatical features as input to an AES model: (1) grammatical items that writers used correctly in essays, and (2) the number of grammatical errors. Experimental results show that grammatical features improve the performance of AES models that predict the holistic scores of essays. Multi-task learning with the holistic and grammar scores, alongside using grammatical features, resulted in a larger improvement in model performance. We also show that a model using grammar abilities estimated using Item Response Theory (IRT) as the labels for the auxiliary task achieved comparable performance to when we used grammar scores assigned by human raters. In addition, we weight the grammatical features using IRT to consider the difficulty of grammatical items and writers’ grammar abilities. We found that weighting grammatical features with the difficulty led to further improvement in performance.

It remains a question that how simultaneous interpretation (SI) data affects simultaneous machine translation (SiMT). Research has been limited due to the lack of a large-scale training corpus. In this work, we aim to fill in the gap by introducing NAIST-SIC-Aligned, which is an automatically-aligned parallel English-Japanese SI dataset. Starting with a non-aligned corpus NAIST-SIC, we propose a two-stage alignment approach to make the corpus parallel and thus suitable for model training. The first stage is coarse alignment where we perform a many-to-many mapping between source and target sentences, and the second stage is fine-grained alignment where we perform intra- and inter-sentence filtering to improve the quality of aligned pairs. To ensure the quality of the corpus, each step has been validated either quantitatively or qualitatively. This is the first open-sourced large-scale parallel SI dataset in the literature. We also manually curated a small test set for evaluation purposes. Our results show that models trained with SI data lead to significant improvement in translation quality and latency over baselines. We hope our work advances research on SI corpora construction and SiMT. Our data will be released upon the paper’s acceptance.

This paper describes NAIST’s submission to the IWSLT 2023 Simultaneous Speech Translation task: English-to-German, Japanese, Chinese speech-to-text translation and English-to-Japanese speech-to-speech translation. Our speech-to-text system uses an end-to-end multilingual speech translation model based on large-scale pre-trained speech and text models. We add Inter-connections into the model to incorporate the outputs from intermediate layers of the pre-trained speech model and augment prefix-to-prefix text data using Bilingual Prefix Alignment to enhance the simultaneity of the offline speech translation model. Our speech-to-speech system employs an incremental text-to-speech module that consists of a Japanese pronunciation estimation model, an acoustic model, and a neural vocoder.

This paper describes NAIST’s simultaneous speech translation systems developed for IWSLT 2022 Evaluation Campaign. We participated the speech-to-speech track for English-to-German and English-to-Japanese. Our primary submissions were end-to-end systems using adaptive segmentation policies based on Prefix Alignment.

This paper describes NAIST’s system for the English-to-Japanese Simultaneous Text-to-text Translation Task in IWSLT 2021 Evaluation Campaign. Our primary submission is based on wait-k neural machine translation with sequence-level knowledge distillation to encourage literal translation.

This paper describes the construction of a new large-scale English-Japanese Simultaneous Interpretation (SI) corpus and presents the results of its analysis. A portion of the corpus contains SI data from three interpreters with different amounts of experience. Some of the SI data were manually aligned with the source speeches at the sentence level. Their latency, quality, and word order aspects were compared among the SI data themselves as well as against offline translations. The results showed that (1) interpreters with more experience controlled the latency and quality better, and (2) large latency hurt the SI quality.