Exploring Phoneme-Level Speech Representations for End-to-End Speech Translation

Understand

Previous work on end-to-end translation from speech has primarily used frame-level features as speech representations, which creates longer, sparser sequences than text.

• We show that a naive method to create compressed phoneme-like speech representations is far more effective and efficient for translation than traditional frame-level speech features.
• Specifically, we generate phoneme labels for speech frames and average consecutive frames with the same label to create shorter, higher-level source sequences for translation.
• We see improvements of up to 5 BLEU on both our high and low resource language pairs, with a reduction in training time of 60%.