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Holger Schwenk

14 accepted papers

2026

Unified Vision–Language Modeling via Concept Space Alignment

ICLR 2026poster

We introduce vSONAR, a vision–language embedding space extended from the text-only embedding space SONAR, which supports 200 text languages and 37 speech languages. To construct vSONAR, we propose a post-hoc alignment pipeline that maps the representations of an existing vision encoder into the SONA…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

LCFO: Long Context and Long Form Output Dataset and Benchmarking

ACL 2025finding

This paper presents the Long Context and Form Output (LCFO) benchmark, a novel evaluation framework for assessing gradual summarization and summary expansion capabilities across diverse domains. LCFO consists of long input documents (5k words average length), each of which comes with three summaries…

2024

Aligning Speech Segments Beyond Pure Semantics

ACL 2024findings

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 corpo…

2023

BLASER: A Text-Free Speech-to-Speech Translation Evaluation Metric

ACL 2023long

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 propos…

2023

DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance

ICLR 2023top-25%

Image generation has recently seen tremendous advances, with diffusion models allowing to synthesize convincing images for a large variety of text prompts. In this article, we propose DiffEdit, a method to take advantage of text-conditioned diffusion models for the task of semantic image editing, wh…

Cited by 508SourcePDFScholar
2023

Speech-to-Speech Translation for a Real-world Unwritten Language

ACL 2023findings

We study speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) that translates speech from one language into another language and focuses on building systems to support languages without standard text writing systems. We use English-Taiwanese Hokkien as a case study, and present an end-to-end solution from training d…

2023

SpeechMatrix: A Large-Scale Mined Corpus of Multilingual Speech-to-Speech Translations

ACL 2023long

We present SpeechMatrix, a large-scale multilingual corpus of speech-to-speech translations mined from real speech of European Parliament recordings. It contains speech alignments in 136 language pairs with a total of 418 thousand hours of speech. To evaluate the quality of this parallel speech, we…

Cited by 34SourcePDFScholar
2023

xSIM++: An Improved Proxy to Bitext Mining Performance for Low-Resource Languages

ACL 2023short

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 m…

2022

Bitext Mining Using Distilled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Languages

EMNLP 2022finding

Scaling multilingual representation learning beyond the hundred most frequent languages is challenging, in particular to cover the long tail of low-resource languages. We move away from the popular one-for-all multilingual models and focus on training multiple language (family) specific representati…

2022

FlexIT: Towards Flexible Semantic Image Translation

CVPR 2022poster

Deep generative models, like GANs, have considerably improved the state of the art in image synthesis, and are able to generate near photo-realistic images in structured domains such as human faces. Based on this success, recent work on image editing proceeds by projecting images to the GAN latent s…

Cited by 37PDFcodeScholar
2022

T-Modules: Translation Modules for Zero-Shot Cross-Modal Machine Translation

EMNLP 2022main

We present a new approach to perform zero-shot cross-modal transfer between speech and text for translation tasks. Multilingual speech and text are encoded in a joint fixed-size representation space. Then, we compare different approaches to decode these multimodal and multilingual fixed-size represe…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2022

Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation on Real Data

NAACL 2022long

We present a textless speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) system that can translate speech from one language into another language and can be built without the need of any text data. Different from existing work in the literature, we tackle the challenge in modeling multi-speaker target speech and t…

Cited by 157SourcePDFScholar
2021

CCMatrix: Mining Billions of High-Quality Parallel Sentences on the Web

ACL 2021long

We show that margin-based bitext mining in a multilingual sentence space can be successfully scaled to operate on monolingual corpora of billions of sentences. We use 32 snapshots of a curated common crawl corpus (Wenzel et al, 2019) totaling 71 billion unique sentences. Using one unified approach f…

2021

Multimodal and Multilingual Embeddings for Large-Scale Speech Mining

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

We present an approach to encode a speech signal into a fixed-size representation which minimizes the cosine loss with the existing massively multilingual LASER text embedding space. Sentences are close in this embedding space, independently of their language and modality, either text or audio. Usin…