In this paper, we describe end-to-end simultaneous speech-to-text and text-to-text translation systems submitted to IWSLT2020 online translation challenge. The systems are built by adding wait-k and meta-learning approaches to the Transformer architecture. The systems are evaluated on different latency regimes. The simultaneous text-to-text translation achieved a BLEU score of 26.38 compared to the competition baseline score of 14.17 on the low latency regime (Average latency ≤ 3). The simultaneous speech-to-text system improves the BLEU score by 7.7 points over the competition baseline for the low latency regime (Average Latency ≤ 1000).

In general, the direct Speech-to-text translation (ST) is jointly trained with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and Machine Translation (MT) tasks. However, the issues with the current joint learning strategies inhibit the knowledge transfer across these tasks. We propose a task modulation network which allows the model to learn task specific features, while learning the shared features simultaneously. This proposed approach removes the need for separate finetuning step resulting in a single model which performs all these tasks. This single model achieves a performance of 28.64 BLEU score on ST MuST-C English-German, WER of 11.61% on ASR TEDLium v3, 23.35 BLEU score on MT WMT'15 English-German task. This sets a new state-of-the-art performance (SOTA) on the ST task while outperforming the existing end-to-end ASR systems.

No abstract

No abstract