Fabrício Carraro


2026

The Amazon basin along the Peru–Brazil border hosts extraordinary linguistic diversity, including many Indigenous languages whose speaker communities span national frontiers. Despite sustained documentation work, most remain extremely low-resource languages (ELRLs) for Natural Language Processing (NLP): reusable corpora are scarce, orthographies vary across countries and institutions, and basic tools such as tokenizers, taggers, and morphological analyzers are largely unavailable. We present a resource-oriented survey of five Indigenous languages of the Western Amazon—Matsés, Amahuaca, Kashinawa, Ticuna, and Kukama-Kukamiria—aimed at supporting more realistic NLP and speech work in extreme low-resource settings. Using a systematic search across academic venues, language archives, and public code/model repositories, we identify and cross-check available materials spanning lexical resources, text corpora, linguistic annotation, and speech collections. For each item we record practical reuse information, including the relevant task or modality, source location, and any stated access, licensing, or usage conditions. Our findings show strong cross-language asymmetries and fragmentation: most materials concentrate in documentation artifacts and lexicons, while standardized datasets with clear access and reuse conditions suitable for training and evaluation remain rare. We conclude with concrete recommendations to improve discoverability, normalize orthographic variation, and prioritize resource creation that maximizes interoperability across tools and benchmarks.
We present a unified pipeline for synthesizing high-quality Quechua and Spanish speech for the Peruvian Constitution using three state-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) architectures: XTTS v2, F5-TTS, and DiFlow-TTS. Our models are trained on independent Spanish and Quechua speech datasets with heterogeneous sizes and recording conditions, and leverage bilingual and multilingual TTS capabilities to improve synthesis quality in both languages. By exploiting cross-lingual transfer, our framework mitigates data scarcity in Quechua while preserving naturalness in Spanish. We release trained checkpoints, inference code, and synthesized audio for each constitutional article, providing a reusable resource for speech technologies in indigenous and multilingual contexts. This work contributes to the development of inclusive TTS systems for political and legal content in low-resource settings
This paper describes the QUESPA team’s speech translation (ST) submissions for the Quechua to Spanish (QUE-SPA) track of the IWSLT 2026 Evaluation Campaign on dialectal and low-resource speech translation. The campaign supports a single submission category, namely unconstrained. This marks our fourth consecutive participation in the IWSLT shared task, building upon prior systems with substantial improvements. Our 2026 submission comprises three unconstrained-only systems. The best-performing system (contrastive 2) extends our strongest model from the previous year by leveraging a high-performing pre-trained language model (PLM) for end-to-end speech translation without cascading, augmented with additional Quechua-Collao text - now made available on the IWSLT GitHub. Fine-tuning Microsoft’s SpeechT5 model in an ST setting, combined with targeted data augmentation, results in a BLEU score of 27.2 on the official evaluation set. Additionally, we evaluate prompt-based machine translation using Gemini, DeepSeek, GPT-5, Claude, and Qwen for the first time. Aside from that, we introduce SIDON, an audio enhancement framework designed to improve audio quality. This paper provides a comparative analysis across our current and three previous IWSLT submissions, with a detailed examination of the impact of synthetic data, unconstrained external resources, and audio enhancement techniques on fine-tuning performance. Our results highlight the complementary role of PLM-based ST, LLM prompting, and ASR enhancement in advancing low-resource speech translation.
This paper reports on the outcomes of the shared tasks organized as part of the 23rd International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT). The workshop covered ten major challenges in spoken language translation, including speech-to-text translation for both high-resource and low-resource language pairs, customized speech translation, speech generation, instruction-following speech processing, and the evaluation of speech translation systems. The shared tasks received strong participation, with more than 30 teams submitting runs. This year’s edition broadened the range of tasks, placing particular emphasis on speech generation and evaluation metrics.
We present the CATENG systems submitted to the IWSLT 2026 Dialectal and Low-Resource Speech Translation shared task for the Catalan–English (CA–EN) pair. Although Catalan is not strictly low-resource, its dialectal diversity and relative under-representation in speech technology make it a challenging setting. We evaluate three unconstrained systems: two cascaded approaches combining ASR and MT, and one end-to-end model. Our primary system uses a Mamba-based ASR (ConMamba) with a fine-tuned NLLB-200 MT model, while a contrastive system replaces the ASR with Whisper-v3; we also evaluate an end-to-end SpeechT5 model with data augmentation. Experiments are conducted on the IWSLT 2026 Catalan dataset (15 hours), complemented with large-scale parallel text. Results show that cascaded systems outperform end-to-end ST, with Whisper-v3 + NLLB achieving 44.7 BLEU and 65.1 chrF. We find that performance is primarily constrained by ASR quality rather than MT capacity, and that Mamba-based ASR models provide competitive results, highlighting the importance of robust speech representations and dialectal coverage for Catalan–English speech translation.