Language modeling and transcription of the TED corpus lectures

Transcribing lectures is a challenging task, both in acoustic and in language modeling. In this work, we present our first results on the automatic transcription of lectures from the TED corpus, recently released by ELRA and LDC. In particular, we concentrated our effort on language modeling. Baseline acoustic and language models were developed using respectively 8 hours of TED transcripts and various types of texts: conference proceedings, lecture transcripts, and conversational speech transcripts. Then, adaptation of the language model to single speakers was investigated by exploiting different kinds of information: automatic transcripts of the talk, the title of the talk, the abstract and, finally, the paper. In the last case, a 39.2% WER was achieved

pour une prise en compte du genre dans les actions d'insertion en milieu rural

les actions d'insertion sociale et professionnelle en direction des femmes en milieu rural ont permis de donner une visibilité aux problèmes des femmes. mais elles se heurtent à un marché de l'emploi peu diversifié et à des trajectoires individuelles extrêmement hétérogène

An Arabic-Hebrew parallel corpus of TED talks

We describe an Arabic-Hebrew parallel corpus of TED talks built upon WIT3, the Web inventory that repurposes the original content of the TED website in a way which is more convenient for MT researchers. The benchmark consists of about 2,000 talks, whose subtitles in Arabic and Hebrew have been accurately aligned and rearranged in sentences, for a total of about 3.5M tokens per language. Talks have been partitioned in train, development and test sets similarly in all respects to the MT tasks of the IWSLT 2016 evaluation campaign. In addition to describing the benchmark, we list the problems encountered in preparing it and the novel methods designed to solve them. Baseline MT results and some measures on sentence length are provided as an extrinsic evaluation of the quality of the benchmark

The ITC-irst statistical machine translation system for IWSLT-2004

Focus of this paper is the system for statistical machine translation developed at ITC-irst. It has been employed in the evaluation campaign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation 2004 in all the three data set conditions of the Chinese-English track. Both the statistical model underlying the system and the system architecture are presented. Moreover, details are given on how the submitted runs have been produced. 1

Report on the 11th IWSLT Evaluation Campaign

The paper overviews the 11th evaluation campaign organized by the IWSLT workshop. The 2014 evaluation offered multiple tracks on lecture transcription and translation based on the TED Talks corpus. In particular, this year IWSLT included three automatic speech recognition tracks, on English, German and Italian, five speech translation tracks, from English to French, English to German, German to English, English to Italian, and Italian to English, and five text translation track, also from English to French, English to German, German to English, English to Italian, and Italian to English. In addition to the official tracks, speech and text translation optional tracks were offered, globally involving 12 other languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese (B), Hebrew, Chinese, Polish, Persian, Slovenian, Turkish, Dutch, Romanian, Russian. Overall, 21 teams participated in the evaluation, for a total of 76 primary runs submitted. Participants were also asked to submit runs on the 2013 test set (progress test set), in order to measure the progress of systems with respect to the previous year. All runs were evaluated with objective metrics, and submissions for two of the official text translation tracks were also evaluated with human post-editing

CTC-based Compression for Direct Speech Translation

Previous studies demonstrated that a dynamic phone-informed compression of the input audio is beneficial for speech translation (ST). However, they required a dedicated model for phone recognition and did not test this solution for direct ST, in which a single model translates the input audio into the target language without intermediate representations. In this work, we propose the first method able to perform a dynamic compression of the input indirect ST models. In particular, we exploit the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) to compress the input sequence according to its phonetic characteristics. Our experiments demonstrate that our solution brings a 1.3-1.5 BLEU improvement over a strong baseline on two language pairs (English-Italian and English-German), contextually reducing the memory footprint by more than 10%.Comment: Accepted at EACL202