UM-DFKI Maltese Speech Translation

Aiden Williams, Kurt Abela, Rishu Kumar, Martin Bär, Hannah Billinghurst, Kurt Micallef, Ahnaf Mozib Samin, Andrea DeMarco, Lonneke van der Plas, Claudia Borg

The 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation Long Paper

TLDR: For the 2023 IWSLT Maltese Speech Translation Task, UM-DFKI jointly presents a cascade solution which achieves 0.6 BLEU. While this is the first time that a Maltese speech translation task has been released by IWSLT, this paper explores previous solutions for other speech translation tasks, focusing
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Abstract: For the 2023 IWSLT Maltese Speech Translation Task, UM-DFKI jointly presents a cascade solution which achieves 0.6 BLEU. While this is the first time that a Maltese speech translation task has been released by IWSLT, this paper explores previous solutions for other speech translation tasks, focusing primarily on low-resource scenarios. Moreover, we present our method of fine-tuning XLS-R models for Maltese ASR using a collection of multi-lingual speech corpora as well as the fine-tuning of the mBART model for Maltese to English machine translation.