Generating rare words is a challenging task for natural language processing in general and in speech translation (ST) specifically. This paper introduces a test suite prepared for the Offline ST shared task at IWSLT. In the test suite, corresponding rare words (i.e. named entities) were annotated on TED-Talks for English and German and the English side was made available to the participants together with some distractors (irrelevant named entities). Our evaluation checks the capabilities of ST systems to leverage the information in the contextual list of named entities and improve translation quality. Systems are ranked based on the recall and precision of named entities (separately on person, location, and organization names) in the translated texts. Our evaluation shows that using contextual information improves translation quality as well as the recall and precision of NEs. The recall of organization names in all submissions is the lowest of all categories with a maximum of 87.5 % confirming the difficulties of ST systems in dealing with names.

This paper describes KIT’submission to the IWSLT 2021 Offline Speech Translation Task. We describe a system in both cascaded condition and end-to-end condition. In the cascaded condition, we investigated different end-to-end architectures for the speech recognition module. For the text segmentation module, we trained a small transformer-based model on high-quality monolingual data. For the translation module, our last year’s neural machine translation model was reused. In the end-to-end condition, we improved our Speech Relative Transformer architecture to reach or even surpass the result of the cascade system.

This paper describes KIT’s submissions to the IWSLT2020 Speech Translation evaluation campaign. We first participate in the simultaneous translation task, in which our simultaneous models are Transformer based and can be efficiently trained to obtain low latency with minimized compromise in quality. On the offline speech translation task, we applied our new Speech Transformer architecture to end-to-end speech translation. The obtained model can provide translation quality which is competitive to a complicated cascade. The latter still has the upper hand, thanks to the ability to transparently access to the transcription, and resegment the inputs to avoid fragmentation.