Publication
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
In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation. International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT-2023), The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, located at ACL, July 14-15, Toronto, ON, Canada, ACL, 2023.
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.