Zero-shot Speech Translation

Abstract: Speech Translation (ST) is the task of translating speech in one language into text in another language. Traditional cascaded approaches for ST, using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Machine Translation (MT) systems, are prone to error propagation. End-to-end approaches use only one system to avoid propagating error, yet are difficult to employ due to data scarcity. We explore zero-shot translation, which enables translating a pair of languages that is unseen during training, thus avoid the use of end-to-end ST data. Zero-shot translation has been shown to work for multilingual machine translation, yet has not been studied for speech translation. We attempt to build zero-shot ST models that are trained only on ASR and MT tasks but can do ST task during inference. The challenge is that the representation of text and audio is significantly different, thus the models learn ASR and MT tasks in different ways, making it non-trivial to perform zero-shot. These models tend to output the wrong language when performing zero-shot ST. We tackle the issues by including additional training data and an auxiliary loss function that minimizes the text-audio difference. Our experiment results and analysis show that the methods are promising for zero-shot ST. Moreover, our methods are particularly useful in the few-shot settings where a limited amount of ST data is available, with improvements of up to +11.8 BLEU points compared to direct end-to-end ST models and +3.9 BLEU points compared to ST models fine-tuned from pre-trained ASR model.