# Bridging the Modality Gap for Speech-to-Text Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14920 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14920/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Cross-modal Contrastive Learning for Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02444/) (2022)
- [STEMM: Self-learning with Speech-text Manifold Mixup for Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10426/) (2022)
- [Cascade versus Direct Speech Translation: Do the Differences Still Make a Difference?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01045/) (2021)
- [Learning Shared Semantic Space for Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03095/) (2021)
- [Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05752/) (2021)
- [Fused Acoustic and Text Encoding for Multimodal Bilingual Pretraining and Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05766/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Speech Translation via Cross-modal Progressive Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10380/) (2021)
- [RealTranS: End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation with Convolutional Weighted-Shrinking Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04833/) (2021)
- [Learning When to Translate for Streaming Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07368/) (2021)
- [Revisiting End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation From Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04571/) (2022)
- [Pre-training for Speech Translation: CTC Meets Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11716/) (2023)
- [Does Simultaneous Speech Translation need Simultaneous Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03783/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation with Differentiable Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16093/) (2023)
- [WACO: Word-Aligned Contrastive Learning for Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09359/) (2022)
- [T-Modules: Translation Modules for Zero-Shot Cross-Modal Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12216/) (2022)
- [Speechformer: Reducing Information Loss in Direct Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04574/) (2021)
- [M-Adapter: Modality Adaptation for End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00952/) (2022)
- [Recent Advances in Direct Speech-to-text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11646/) (2023)
- [When Good and Reproducible Results are a Giant with Feet of Clay: The Importance of Software Quality in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16166/) (2023)
- [Pushing the Limits of Zero-shot End-to-End Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10422/) (2024)
- [Bayes risk CTC: Controllable CTC alignment in Sequence-to-Sequence tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07499/) (2022)
- [LLaST: Improved End-to-end Speech Translation System Leveraged by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15415/) (2024)
- [Non-autoregressive End-to-end Speech Translation with Parallel Autoregressive Rescoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04411/) (2021)
- [Fast-MD: Fast Multi-Decoder End-to-End Speech Translation with Non-Autoregressive Hidden Intermediates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12804/) (2021)
- [Improving End-to-end Speech Translation by Leveraging Auxiliary Speech and Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01778/) (2022)
- [CTC-based Non-autoregressive Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17358/) (2023)
- [Tuning Large language model for End-to-end Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02050/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01053/) (2023)
- [Distilling a Pretrained Language Model to a Multilingual ASR Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12638/) (2022)
- [Direct Speech Translation for Automatic Subtitling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13192/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end speech translation aims to translate speech in one language into text in another language via an end-to-end way. Most existing methods employ an encoder-decoder structure with a single encoder to learn acoustic representation and semantic information simultaneously, which ignores the speech-and-text modality differences and makes the encoder overloaded, leading to great difficulty in learning such a model. To address these issues, we propose a Speech-to-Text Adaptation for Speech Translation (STAST) model which aims to improve the end-to-end model performance by bridging the modality gap between speech and text. Specifically, we decouple the speech translation encoder into three parts and introduce a shrink mechanism to match the length of speech representation with that of the corresponding text transcription. To obtain better semantic representation, we completely integrate a text-based translation model into the STAST so that two tasks can be trained in the same latent space. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-modal adaptation method to close the distance between speech and text representation. Experimental results on English-French and English-German speech translation corpora have shown that our model significantly outperforms strong baselines, and achieves the new state-of-the-art performance.