Juan Pino


2021

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Multilingual Speech Translation from Efficient Finetuning of Pretrained Models
Xian Li | Changhan Wang | Yun Tang | Chau Tran | Yuqing Tang | Juan Pino | Alexei Baevski | Alexis Conneau | Michael Auli
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present a simple yet effective approach to build multilingual speech-to-text (ST) translation through efficient transfer learning from a pretrained speech encoder and text decoder. Our key finding is that a minimalistic LNA (LayerNorm and Attention) finetuning can achieve zero-shot crosslingual and cross-modality transfer ability by only finetuning 10 50% of the pretrained parameters. This effectively leverages large pretrained models at low training cost such as wav2vec 2.0 for acoustic modeling, and mBART for multilingual text generation. This sets a new state-of-the-art for 36 translation directions (and surpassing cascaded ST for 26 of them) on the large-scale multilingual ST benchmark CoVoST 2 (+6.4 BLEU on average for En-X directions and +6.7 BLEU for X-En directions). Our approach demonstrates strong zero-shot performance in a many-to-many multilingual model (+5.6 BLEU on average across 28 non-English directions), making it an appealing approach for attaining high-quality speech translation with improved parameter and data efficiency.

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VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation
Changhan Wang | Morgane Riviere | Ann Lee | Anne Wu | Chaitanya Talnikar | Daniel Haziza | Mary Williamson | Juan Pino | Emmanuel Dupoux
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We introduce VoxPopuli, a large-scale multilingual corpus providing 400K hours of unlabeled speech data in 23 languages. It is the largest open data to date for unsupervised representation learning as well as semi-supervised learning. VoxPopuli also contains 1.8K hours of transcribed speeches in 15 languages and their aligned oral interpretations into 15 target languages totaling 17.3K hours. We provide speech recognition (ASR) baselines and validate the versatility of VoxPopuli unlabeled data in semi-supervised ASR and speech-to-text translation under challenging out-of-domain settings. The corpus is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/voxpopuli.

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Improving Speech Translation by Understanding and Learning from the Auxiliary Text Translation Task
Yun Tang | Juan Pino | Xian Li | Changhan Wang | Dmitriy Genzel
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Pretraining and multitask learning are widely used to improve the speech translation performance. In this study, we are interested in training a speech translation model along with an auxiliary text translation task. We conduct a detailed analysis to understand the impact of the auxiliary task on the primary task within the multitask learning framework. Our analysis confirms that multitask learning tends to generate similar decoder representations from different modalities and preserve more information from the pretrained text translation modules. We observe minimal negative transfer effect between the two tasks and sharing more parameters is helpful to transfer knowledge from the text task to the speech task. The analysis also reveals that the modality representation difference at the top decoder layers is still not negligible, and those layers are critical for the translation quality. Inspired by these findings, we propose three methods to improve translation quality. First, a parameter sharing and initialization strategy is proposed to enhance information sharing between the tasks. Second, a novel attention-based regularization is proposed for the encoders and pulls the representations from different modalities closer. Third, an online knowledge distillation is proposed to enhance the knowledge transfer from the text to the speech task. Our experiments show that the proposed approach improves translation performance by more than 2 BLEU over a strong baseline and achieves state-of-the-art results on the MuST-C English-German, English-French and English-Spanish language pairs.

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Lightweight Adapter Tuning for Multilingual Speech Translation
Hang Le | Juan Pino | Changhan Wang | Jiatao Gu | Didier Schwab | Laurent Besacier
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Adapter modules were recently introduced as an efficient alternative to fine-tuning in NLP. Adapter tuning consists in freezing pre-trained parameters of a model and injecting lightweight modules between layers, resulting in the addition of only a small number of task-specific trainable parameters. While adapter tuning was investigated for multilingual neural machine translation, this paper proposes a comprehensive analysis of adapters for multilingual speech translation (ST). Starting from different pre-trained models (a multilingual ST trained on parallel data or a multilingual BART (mBART) trained on non parallel multilingual data), we show that adapters can be used to: (a) efficiently specialize ST to specific language pairs with a low extra cost in terms of parameters, and (b) transfer from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) task and an mBART pre-trained model to a multilingual ST task. Experiments show that adapter tuning offer competitive results to full fine-tuning, while being much more parameter-efficient.

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fairseq Sˆ2: A Scalable and Integrable Speech Synthesis Toolkit
Changhan Wang | Wei-Ning Hsu | Yossi Adi | Adam Polyak | Ann Lee | Peng-Jen Chen | Jiatao Gu | Juan Pino
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

This paper presents fairseq Sˆ2, a fairseq extension for speech synthesis. We implement a number of autoregressive (AR) and non-AR text-to-speech models, and their multi-speaker variants. To enable training speech synthesis models with less curated data, a number of preprocessing tools are built and their importance is shown empirically. To facilitate faster iteration of development and analysis, a suite of automatic metrics is included. Apart from the features added specifically for this extension, fairseq Sˆ2 also benefits from the scalability offered by fairseq and can be easily integrated with other state-of-the-art systems provided in this framework. The code, documentation, and pre-trained models will be made available at https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/speech_synthesis.

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FINDINGS OF THE IWSLT 2021 EVALUATION CAMPAIGN
Antonios Anastasopoulos | Ondřej Bojar | Jacob Bremerman | Roldano Cattoni | Maha Elbayad | Marcello Federico | Xutai Ma | Satoshi Nakamura | Matteo Negri | Jan Niehues | Juan Pino | Elizabeth Salesky | Sebastian Stüker | Katsuhito Sudoh | Marco Turchi | Alexander Waibel | Changhan Wang | Matthew Wiesner
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2021)

The evaluation campaign of the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2021) featured this year four shared tasks: (i) Simultaneous speech translation, (ii) Offline speech translation, (iii) Multilingual speech translation, (iv) Low-resource speech translation. A total of 22 teams participated in at least one of the tasks. This paper describes each shared task, data and evaluation metrics, and reports results of the received submissions.

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FST: the FAIR Speech Translation System for the IWSLT21 Multilingual Shared Task
Yun Tang | Hongyu Gong | Xian Li | Changhan Wang | Juan Pino | Holger Schwenk | Naman Goyal
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2021)

In this paper, we describe our end-to-end multilingual speech translation system submitted to the IWSLT 2021 evaluation campaign on the Multilingual Speech Translation shared task. Our system is built by leveraging transfer learning across modalities, tasks and languages. First, we leverage general-purpose multilingual modules pretrained with large amounts of unlabelled and labelled data. We further enable knowledge transfer from the text task to the speech task by training two tasks jointly. Finally, our multilingual model is finetuned on speech translation task-specific data to achieve the best translation results. Experimental results show our system outperforms the reported systems, including both end-to-end and cascaded based approaches, by a large margin. In some translation directions, our speech translation results evaluated on the public Multilingual TEDx test set are even comparable with the ones from a strong text-to-text translation system, which uses the oracle speech transcripts as input.

2020

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SimulMT to SimulST: Adapting Simultaneous Text Translation to End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation
Xutai Ma | Juan Pino | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

We investigate how to adapt simultaneous text translation methods such as wait-k and monotonic multihead attention to end-to-end simultaneous speech translation by introducing a pre-decision module. A detailed analysis is provided on the latency-quality trade-offs of combining fixed and flexible pre-decision with fixed and flexible policies. We also design a novel computation-aware latency metric, adapted from Average Lagging.

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Fairseq S2T: Fast Speech-to-Text Modeling with Fairseq
Changhan Wang | Yun Tang | Xutai Ma | Anne Wu | Dmytro Okhonko | Juan Pino
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

We introduce fairseq S2T, a fairseq extension for speech-to-text (S2T) modeling tasks such as end-to-end speech recognition and speech-to-text translation. It follows fairseq’s careful design for scalability and extensibility. We provide end-to-end workflows from data pre-processing, model training to offline (online) inference. We implement state-of-the-art RNN-based as well as Transformer-based models and open-source detailed training recipes. Fairseq’s machine translation models and language models can be seamlessly integrated into S2T workflows for multi-task learning or transfer learning. Fairseq S2T is available at https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/speech_to_text.

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SIMULEVAL: An Evaluation Toolkit for Simultaneous Translation
Xutai Ma | Mohammad Javad Dousti | Changhan Wang | Jiatao Gu | Juan Pino
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Simultaneous translation on both text and speech focuses on a real-time and low-latency scenario where the model starts translating before reading the complete source input. Evaluating simultaneous translation models is more complex than offline models because the latency is another factor to consider in addition to translation quality. The research community, despite its growing focus on novel modeling approaches to simultaneous translation, currently lacks a universal evaluation procedure. Therefore, we present SimulEval, an easy-to-use and general evaluation toolkit for both simultaneous text and speech translation. A server-client scheme is introduced to create a simultaneous translation scenario, where the server sends source input and receives predictions for evaluation and the client executes customized policies. Given a policy, it automatically performs simultaneous decoding and collectively reports several popular latency metrics. We also adapt latency metrics from text simultaneous translation to the speech task. Additionally, SimulEval is equipped with a visualization interface to provide better understanding of the simultaneous decoding process of a system. SimulEval has already been extensively used for the IWSLT 2020 shared task on simultaneous speech translation. Code will be released upon publication.

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Findings of the WMT 2020 Shared Task on Machine Translation Robustness
Lucia Specia | Zhenhao Li | Juan Pino | Vishrav Chaudhary | Francisco Guzmán | Graham Neubig | Nadir Durrani | Yonatan Belinkov | Philipp Koehn | Hassan Sajjad | Paul Michel | Xian Li
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

We report the findings of the second edition of the shared task on improving robustness in Machine Translation (MT). The task aims to test current machine translation systems in their ability to handle challenges facing MT models to be deployed in the real world, including domain diversity and non-standard texts common in user generated content, especially in social media. We cover two language pairs – English-German and English-Japanese and provide test sets in zero-shot and few-shot variants. Participating systems are evaluated both automatically and manually, with an additional human evaluation for ”catastrophic errors”. We received 59 submissions by 11 participating teams from a variety of types of institutions.

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Dual-decoder Transformer for Joint Automatic Speech Recognition and Multilingual Speech Translation
Hang Le | Juan Pino | Changhan Wang | Jiatao Gu | Didier Schwab | Laurent Besacier
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

We introduce dual-decoder Transformer, a new model architecture that jointly performs automatic speech recognition (ASR) and multilingual speech translation (ST). Our models are based on the original Transformer architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017) but consist of two decoders, each responsible for one task (ASR or ST). Our major contribution lies in how these decoders interact with each other: one decoder can attend to different information sources from the other via a dual-attention mechanism. We propose two variants of these architectures corresponding to two different levels of dependencies between the decoders, called the parallel and cross dual-decoder Transformers, respectively. Extensive experiments on the MuST-C dataset show that our models outperform the previously-reported highest translation performance in the multilingual settings, and outperform as well bilingual one-to-one results. Furthermore, our parallel models demonstrate no trade-off between ASR and ST compared to the vanilla multi-task architecture. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/formiel/speech-translation.

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FINDINGS OF THE IWSLT 2020 EVALUATION CAMPAIGN
Ebrahim Ansari | Amittai Axelrod | Nguyen Bach | Ondřej Bojar | Roldano Cattoni | Fahim Dalvi | Nadir Durrani | Marcello Federico | Christian Federmann | Jiatao Gu | Fei Huang | Kevin Knight | Xutai Ma | Ajay Nagesh | Matteo Negri | Jan Niehues | Juan Pino | Elizabeth Salesky | Xing Shi | Sebastian Stüker | Marco Turchi | Alexander Waibel | Changhan Wang
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation

The evaluation campaign of the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2020) featured this year six challenge tracks: (i) Simultaneous speech translation, (ii) Video speech translation, (iii) Offline speech translation, (iv) Conversational speech translation, (v) Open domain translation, and (vi) Non-native speech translation. A total of teams participated in at least one of the tracks. This paper introduces each track’s goal, data and evaluation metrics, and reports the results of the received submissions.

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CoVoST: A Diverse Multilingual Speech-To-Text Translation Corpus
Changhan Wang | Juan Pino | Anne Wu | Jiatao Gu
Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Spoken language translation has recently witnessed a resurgence in popularity, thanks to the development of end-to-end models and the creation of new corpora, such as Augmented LibriSpeech and MuST-C. Existing datasets involve language pairs with English as a source language, involve very specific domains or are low resource. We introduce CoVoST, a multilingual speech-to-text translation corpus from 11 languages into English, diversified with over 11,000 speakers and over 60 accents. We describe the dataset creation methodology and provide empirical evidence of the quality of the data. We also provide initial benchmarks, including, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end many-to-one multilingual models for spoken language translation. CoVoST is released under CC0 license and free to use. We also provide additional evaluation data derived from Tatoeba under CC licenses.

2019

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Findings of the First Shared Task on Machine Translation Robustness
Xian Li | Paul Michel | Antonios Anastasopoulos | Yonatan Belinkov | Nadir Durrani | Orhan Firat | Philipp Koehn | Graham Neubig | Juan Pino | Hassan Sajjad
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)

We share the findings of the first shared task on improving robustness of Machine Translation (MT). The task provides a testbed representing challenges facing MT models deployed in the real world, and facilitates new approaches to improve models’ robustness to noisy input and domain mismatch. We focus on two language pairs (English-French and English-Japanese), and the submitted systems are evaluated on a blind test set consisting of noisy comments on Reddit and professionally sourced translations. As a new task, we received 23 submissions by 11 participating teams from universities, companies, national labs, etc. All submitted systems achieved large improvements over baselines, with the best improvement having +22.33 BLEU. We evaluated submissions by both human judgment and automatic evaluation (BLEU), which shows high correlations (Pearson’s r = 0.94 and 0.95). Furthermore, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the submitted systems using compare-mt, which revealed their salient differences in handling challenges in this task. Such analysis provides additional insights when there is occasional disagreement between human judgment and BLEU, e.g. systems better at producing colloquial expressions received higher score from human judgment.

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Findings of the WMT 2019 Shared Task on Parallel Corpus Filtering for Low-Resource Conditions
Philipp Koehn | Francisco Guzmán | Vishrav Chaudhary | Juan Pino
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2)

Following the WMT 2018 Shared Task on Parallel Corpus Filtering, we posed the challenge of assigning sentence-level quality scores for very noisy corpora of sentence pairs crawled from the web, with the goal of sub-selecting 2% and 10% of the highest-quality data to be used to train machine translation systems. This year, the task tackled the low resource condition of Nepali-English and Sinhala-English. Eleven participants from companies, national research labs, and universities participated in this task.

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Harnessing Indirect Training Data for End-to-End Automatic Speech Translation: Tricks of the Trade
Juan Pino | Liezl Puzon | Jiatao Gu | Xutai Ma | Arya D. McCarthy | Deepak Gopinath
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation

For automatic speech translation (AST), end-to-end approaches are outperformed by cascaded models that transcribe with automatic speech recognition (ASR), then trans- late with machine translation (MT). A major cause of the performance gap is that, while existing AST corpora are small, massive datasets exist for both the ASR and MT subsystems. In this work, we evaluate several data augmentation and pretraining approaches for AST, by comparing all on the same datasets. Simple data augmentation by translating ASR transcripts proves most effective on the English–French augmented LibriSpeech dataset, closing the performance gap from 8.2 to 1.4 BLEU, compared to a very strong cascade that could directly utilize copious ASR and MT data. The same end-to-end approach plus fine-tuning closes the gap on the English–Romanian MuST-C dataset from 6.7 to 3.7 BLEU. In addition to these results, we present practical rec- ommendations for augmentation and pretraining approaches. Finally, we decrease the performance gap to 0.01 BLEU us- ing a Transformer-based architecture.

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On Evaluation of Adversarial Perturbations for Sequence-to-Sequence Models
Paul Michel | Xian Li | Graham Neubig | Juan Pino
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Adversarial examples — perturbations to the input of a model that elicit large changes in the output — have been shown to be an effective way of assessing the robustness of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models. However, these perturbations only indicate weaknesses in the model if they do not change the input so significantly that it legitimately results in changes in the expected output. This fact has largely been ignored in the evaluations of the growing body of related literature. Using the example of untargeted attacks on machine translation (MT), we propose a new evaluation framework for adversarial attacks on seq2seq models that takes the semantic equivalence of the pre- and post-perturbation input into account. Using this framework, we demonstrate that existing methods may not preserve meaning in general, breaking the aforementioned assumption that source side perturbations should not result in changes in the expected output. We further use this framework to demonstrate that adding additional constraints on attacks allows for adversarial perturbations that are more meaning-preserving, but nonetheless largely change the output sequence. Finally, we show that performing untargeted adversarial training with meaning-preserving attacks is beneficial to the model in terms of adversarial robustness, without hurting test performance. A toolkit implementing our evaluation framework is released at https://github.com/pmichel31415/teapot-nlp.

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The FLORES Evaluation Datasets for Low-Resource Machine Translation: Nepali–English and Sinhala–English
Francisco Guzmán | Peng-Jen Chen | Myle Ott | Juan Pino | Guillaume Lample | Philipp Koehn | Vishrav Chaudhary | Marc’Aurelio Ranzato
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

For machine translation, a vast majority of language pairs in the world are considered low-resource because they have little parallel data available. Besides the technical challenges of learning with limited supervision, it is difficult to evaluate methods trained on low-resource language pairs because of the lack of freely and publicly available benchmarks. In this work, we introduce the FLORES evaluation datasets for Nepali–English and Sinhala– English, based on sentences translated from Wikipedia. Compared to English, these are languages with very different morphology and syntax, for which little out-of-domain parallel data is available and for which relatively large amounts of monolingual data are freely available. We describe our process to collect and cross-check the quality of translations, and we report baseline performance using several learning settings: fully supervised, weakly supervised, semi-supervised, and fully unsupervised. Our experiments demonstrate that current state-of-the-art methods perform rather poorly on this benchmark, posing a challenge to the research community working on low-resource MT. Data and code to reproduce our experiments are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/flores.

2013

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The University of Cambridge Russian-English System at WMT13
Juan Pino | Aurelien Waite | Tong Xiao | Adrià de Gispert | Federico Flego | William Byrne
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2010

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Hierarchical Phrase-Based Translation Grammars Extracted from Alignment Posterior Probabilities
Adrià de Gispert | Juan Pino | William Byrne
Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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The CUED HiFST System for the WMT10 Translation Shared Task
Juan Pino | Gonzalo Iglesias | Adrià de Gispert | Graeme Blackwood | Jamie Brunning | William Byrne
Proceedings of the Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and MetricsMATR

2009

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An Application of Latent Semantic Analysis to Word Sense Discrimination for Words with Related and Unrelated Meanings
Juan Pino | Maxine Eskenazi
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

2008

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Retrieval of Reading Materials for Vocabulary and Reading Practice
Michael Heilman | Le Zhao | Juan Pino | Maxine Eskenazi
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications