# The NiuTrans End-to-End Speech Translation System for IWSLT 2021 Offline Task

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.02444 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02444/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07947/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Transformer Models for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01787/) (2019)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Models Can Directly Translate Foreign Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08581/) (2017)
- [Europarl-ST: A Multilingual Corpus For Speech Translation Of Parliamentary Debates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03167/) (2019)
- [Listen and Translate: A Proof of Concept for End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01744/) (2016)
- [CoVoST 2 and Massively Multilingual Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10310/) (2020)
- [Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05752/) (2021)
- [A Comparative Study on End-to-end Speech to Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08870/) (2019)
- [Shallow-to-Deep Training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03737/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Speech-Translation with Knowledge Distillation: FBK@IWSLT2020](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02965/) (2020)
- [Relative Positional Encoding for Speech Recognition and Direct Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09940/) (2020)
- [Learning Light-Weight Translation Models from Deep Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13866/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Does Simultaneous Speech Translation need Simultaneous Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03783/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes the submission of the NiuTrans end-to-end speech translation system for the IWSLT 2021 offline task, which translates from the English audio to German text directly without intermediate transcription. We use the Transformer-based model architecture and enhance it by Conformer, relative position encoding, and stacked acoustic and textual encoding. To augment the training data, the English transcriptions are translated to German translations. Finally, we employ ensemble decoding to integrate the predictions from several models trained with the different datasets. Combining these techniques, we achieve 33.84 BLEU points on the MuST-C En-De test set, which shows the enormous potential of the end-to-end model.