Improved Speech-to-Text Translation with the Fisher and Callhome Spanish–English Speech Translation Corpus

Matt Post, Gaurav Kumar, Adam Lopez, Damianos Karakos, Chris Callison-Burch, Sanjeev Khudanpur

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

Research into the translation of the output of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is hindered by the dearth of datasets developed for that explicit purpose. For Spanish-English translation, in particular, most parallel data available exists only in vastly different domains and registers. In order to support research on cross-lingual speech applications, we introduce the Fisher and Callhome Spanish-English Speech Translation Corpus, supplementing existing LDC audio and transcripts with (a) ASR1-best, lattice, and oracle output produced by the Kaldi recognition system and (b) English translations obtained on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The result is a four-way parallel dataset of Spanish audio, transcriptions, ASR lattices, and English translations of approximately 38 hours of speech, with defined training, development, and
held-out test sets.

We conduct baseline machine translation experiments using models trained on the provided training data, and validate the dataset by corroborating a number of known results in the field, including the utility of in-domain (information, conversational) training data, increased performance translating lattices (instead of recognizer 1-best output), and the relationship between word error rate and BLEU score.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInternational Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2013)
Number of pages7
Publication statusPublished - 2013

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