Xiaohui Zhang


2023

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ESPnet-ST-v2: Multipurpose Spoken Language Translation Toolkit
Brian Yan | Jiatong Shi | Yun Tang | Hirofumi Inaguma | Yifan Peng | Siddharth Dalmia | Peter Polák | Patrick Fernandes | Dan Berrebbi | Tomoki Hayashi | Xiaohui Zhang | Zhaoheng Ni | Moto Hira | Soumi Maiti | Juan Pino | Shinji Watanabe
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

ESPnet-ST-v2 is a revamp of the open-source ESPnet-ST toolkit necessitated by the broadening interests of the spoken language translation community. ESPnet-ST-v2 supports 1) offline speech-to-text translation (ST), 2) simultaneous speech-to-text translation (SST), and 3) offline speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) – each task is supported with a wide variety of approaches, differentiating ESPnet-ST-v2 from other open source spoken language translation toolkits. This toolkit offers state-of-the-art architectures such as transducers, hybrid CTC/attention, multi-decoders with searchable intermediates, time-synchronous blockwise CTC/attention, Translatotron models, and direct discrete unit models. In this paper, we describe the overall design, example models for each task, and performance benchmarking behind ESPnet-ST-v2, which is publicly available at https://github.com/espnet/espnet.

2020

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Multilingual Graphemic Hybrid ASR with Massive Data Augmentation
Chunxi Liu | Qiaochu Zhang | Xiaohui Zhang | Kritika Singh | Yatharth Saraf | Geoffrey Zweig
Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL)

Towards developing high-performing ASR for low-resource languages, approaches to address the lack of resources are to make use of data from multiple languages, and to augment the training data by creating acoustic variations. In this work we present a single grapheme-based ASR model learned on 7 geographically proximal languages, using standard hybrid BLSTM-HMM acoustic models with lattice-free MMI objective. We build the single ASR grapheme set via taking the union over each language-specific grapheme set, and we find such multilingual graphemic hybrid ASR model can perform language-independent recognition on all 7 languages, and substantially outperform each monolingual ASR model. Secondly, we evaluate the efficacy of multiple data augmentation alternatives within language, as well as their complementarity with multilingual modeling. Overall, we show that the proposed multilingual graphemic hybrid ASR with various data augmentation can not only recognize any within training set languages, but also provide large ASR performance improvements.