CoVoST: A Diverse Multilingual Speech-To-Text Translation Corpus

Abstract: Spoken language translation has recently witnessed a resurgence in popularity, thanks to the development of end-to-end models and the creation of new corpora, such as Augmented LibriSpeech and MuST-C. Existing datasets involve language pairs with English as a source language, involve very specific domains or are low resource. We introduce CoVoST, a multilingual speech-to-text translation corpus from 11 languages into English, diversified with over 11,000 speakers and over 60 accents. We describe the dataset creation methodology and provide empirical evidence of the quality of the data. We also provide initial benchmarks, including, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end many-to-one multilingual models for spoken language translation. CoVoST is released under CC0 license and free to use. We also provide additional evaluation data derived from Tatoeba under CC licenses.