Fluent Translations from Disfluent Speech in End-to-End Speech Translation

Elizabeth Salesky, Matthias Sperber, Alexander Waibel


Abstract
Spoken language translation applications for speech suffer due to conversational speech phenomena, particularly the presence of disfluencies. With the rise of end-to-end speech translation models, processing steps such as disfluency removal that were previously an intermediate step between speech recognition and machine translation need to be incorporated into model architectures. We use a sequence-to-sequence model to translate from noisy, disfluent speech to fluent text with disfluencies removed using the recently collected ‘copy-edited’ references for the Fisher Spanish-English dataset. We are able to directly generate fluent translations and introduce considerations about how to evaluate success on this task. This work provides a baseline for a new task, implicitly removing disfluencies in end-to-end translation of conversational speech.
Anthology ID:
N19-1285
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2786–2792
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1285
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1285
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elizabeth Salesky, Matthias Sperber, and Alexander Waibel. 2019. Fluent Translations from Disfluent Speech in End-to-End Speech Translation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 2786–2792, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fluent Translations from Disfluent Speech in End-to-End Speech Translation (Salesky et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1285.pdf