We study speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) that translates speech from one language into another language and focuses on building systems to support languages without standard text writing systems. We use English-Taiwanese Hokkien as a case study, and present an end-to-end solution from training data collection, modeling choices to benchmark dataset release. First, we present efforts on creating human annotated data, automatically mining data from large unlabeled speech datasets, and adopting pseudo-labeling to produce weakly supervised data. On the modeling, we take advantage of recent advances in applying self-supervised discrete representations as target for prediction in S2ST and show the effectiveness of leveraging additional text supervision from Mandarin, a language similar to Hokkien, in model training. Finally, we release an S2ST benchmark set to facilitate future research in this field.

We introduce dGSLM, the first “textless” model able to generate audio samples of naturalistic spoken dialogues. It uses recent work on unsupervised spoken unit discovery coupled with a dual-tower transformer architecture with cross-attention trained on 2000 hours of two-channel raw conversational audio (Fisher dataset) without any text or labels. We show that our model is able to generate speech, laughter, and other paralinguistic signals in the two channels simultaneously and reproduces more naturalistic and fluid turn taking compared to a text-based cascaded model.1,2

Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (AED) are two widely used frameworks for speech-to-text tasks. They are designed for different purposes and each has its own benefits and drawbacks for speech-to-text tasks. In order to leverage strengths of both modeling methods, we propose a solution by combining Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (TAED) for speech-to-text tasks. The new method leverages AED’s strength in non-monotonic sequence to sequence learning while retaining Transducer’s streaming property. In the proposed framework, Transducer and AED share the same speech encoder. The predictor in Transducer is replaced by the decoder in the AED model, and the outputs of the decoder are conditioned on the speech inputs instead of outputs from an unconditioned language model. The proposed solution ensures that the model is optimized by covering all possible read/write scenarios and creates a matched environment for streaming applications. We evaluate the proposed approach on the MuST-C dataset and the findings demonstrate that TAED performs significantly better than Transducer for offline automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech-to-text translation (ST) tasks. In the streaming case, TAED outperforms Transducer in the ASR task and one ST direction while comparable results are achieved in another translation direction.

Textless spoken language processing is an exciting area of research that promises to extend applicability of the standard NLP toolset onto spoken language and languages with few or no textual resources. Here, we introduce textless-lib, a PyTorch-based library aimed to facilitate research in the area. We describe the building blocks that the library provides and demonstrate its usability by discuss three different use-case examples: (i) speaker probing, (ii) speech resynthesis and compression, and (iii) speech continuation. We believe that textless-lib substantially simplifies research the textless setting and will be handful not only for speech researchers but also for the NLP community at large.