Roman Kovalev


2024

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UOM-Constrained IWSLT 2024 Shared Task Submission - Maltese Speech Translation
Kurt Abela | Md Abdur Razzaq Riyadh | Melanie Galea | Alana Busuttil | Roman Kovalev | Aiden Williams | Claudia Borg
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2024)

This paper presents our IWSLT-2024 shared task submission on the low-resource track. This submission forms part of the constrained setup; implying limited data for training. Following the introduction, this paper consists of a literature review defining previous approaches to speech translation, as well as their application to Maltese, followed by the defined methodology, evaluation and results, and the conclusion. A cascaded submission on the Maltese to English language pair is presented; consisting of a pipeline containing: a DeepSpeech 1 Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, a KenLM model to optimise the transcriptions, and finally an LSTM machine translation model. The submission achieves a 0.5 BLEU score on the overall test set, and the ASR system achieves a word error rate of 97.15%. Our code is made publicly available.