# IMS' Systems for the IWSLT 2021 Low-Resource Speech Translation Task

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.16055 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16055/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13979/) (2020)
- [Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04558/) (2016)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [Joint CTC-Attention based End-to-End Speech Recognition using Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06773/) (2016)
- [WikiMatrix: Mining 135M Parallel Sentences in 1620 Language Pairs from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05791/) (2019)
- [Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02353/) (2020)
- [CCAligned: A Massive Collection of Cross-Lingual Web-Document Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06154/) (2019)
- [Recent Developments on ESPnet Toolkit Boosted by Conformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13956/) (2020)
- [A Monolingual Approach to Contextualized Word Embeddings for Mid-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06202/) (2020)
- [SPGISpeech: 5,000 hours of transcribed financial audio for fully formatted end-to-end speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02014/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [ArzEn-ST: A Three-way Speech Translation Corpus for Code-Switched Egyptian Arabic - English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12000/) (2022)
- [Investigating Lexical Replacements for Arabic-English Code-Switched Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12649/) (2022)
- [ArzEn-LLM: Code-Switched Egyptian Arabic-English Translation and Speech Recognition Using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18120/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes the submission to the IWSLT 2021 Low-Resource Speech Translation Shared Task by IMS team. We utilize state-of-the-art models combined with several data augmentation, multi-task and transfer learning approaches for the automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) steps of our cascaded system. Moreover, we also explore the feasibility of a full end-to-end speech translation (ST) model in the case of very constrained amount of ground truth labeled data. Our best system achieves the best performance among all submitted systems for Congolese Swahili to English and French with BLEU scores 7.7 and 13.7 respectively, and the second best result for Coastal Swahili to English with BLEU score 14.9.