@inproceedings{dabre-song-2024-nicts,
    title = "{NICT}{'}s Cascaded and End-To-End Speech Translation Systems using Whisper and {I}ndic{T}rans2 for the {I}ndic Task",
    author = "Dabre, Raj  and
      Song, Haiyue",
    editor = "Salesky, Elizabeth  and
      Federico, Marcello  and
      Carpuat, Marine",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2024)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand (in-person and online)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.iwslt-1.3/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.iwslt-1.3",
    pages = "17--22",
    abstract = "This paper presents the NICT{'}s submission for the IWSLT 2024 Indic track, focusing on three speech-to-text (ST) translation directions: English to Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil. We aim to enhance translation quality in this low-resource scenario by integrating state-of-the-art pre-trained automated speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-text machine translation (MT) models. Our cascade system incorporates a Whisper model fine-tuned for ASR and an IndicTrans2 model fine-tuned for MT. Additionally, we propose an end-to-end system that combines a Whisper model for speech-to-text conversion with knowledge distilled from an IndicTrans2 MT model. We first fine-tune the IndicTrans2 model to generate pseudo data in Indic languages. This pseudo data, along with the original English speech data, is then used to fine-tune the Whisper model. Experimental results show that the cascaded system achieved a BLEU score of 51.0, outperforming the end-to-end model, which scored 19.1 BLEU. Moreover, the analysis indicates that applying knowledge distillation from the IndicTrans2 model to the end-to-end ST model improves the translation quality by about 0.7 BLEU."
}