Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation on Real Data
Ann Lee, Hongyu Gong, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Holger Schwenk, Peng-Jen Chen, Changhan Wang, Sravya Popuri, Yossi Adi
Abstract
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 train the systems with real-world S2ST data. The key to our approach is a self-supervised unit-based speech normalization technique, which finetunes a pre-trained speech encoder with paired audios from multiple speakers and a single reference speaker to reduce the variations due to accents, while preserving the lexical content. With only 10 minutes of paired data for speech normalization, we obtain on average 3.2 BLEU gain when training the S2ST model on the VoxPopuli S2ST dataset, compared to a baseline trained on un-normalized speech target. We also incorporate automatically mined S2ST data and show an additional 2.0 BLEU gain. To our knowledge, we are the first to establish a textless S2ST technique that can be trained with real-world data and works for multiple language pairs.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{lee-etal-2022-textless,
title = "Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation on Real Data",
author = "Lee, Ann and
Gong, Hongyu and
Duquenne, Paul-Ambroise and
Schwenk, Holger and
Chen, Peng-Jen and
Wang, Changhan and
Popuri, Sravya and
Adi, Yossi and
Pino, Juan and
Gu, Jiatao and
Hsu, Wei-Ning",
editor = "Carpuat, Marine and
de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine and
Meza Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
month = jul,
year = "2022",
address = "Seattle, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.63/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.63",
pages = "860--872"
}