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A Modular Approach for Romanian-English Speech Translation

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Natural Language Processing and Information Systems (NLDB 2021)

Abstract

Automatic speech to speech translation is known to be highly beneficial in enabling people to directly communicate with each other when they do not share a common language. This work presents a modular system for Romanian to English and English to Romanian speech translation created by integrating four families of components in a cascaded manner: (1) automatic speech recognition, (2) transcription correction, (3) machine translation and (4) text-to-speech. We further experimented with several models for each component and present several indicators of the system’s performance. Modularity allows the system to be expanded with additional modules for each of the four components. The resulting system is currently deployed on RELATE and is available for public usage through the web interface of the platform.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://aimas.cs.pub.ro/robin/en/.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/SeanNaren/deepspeech.pytorch.

  4. 4.

    https://ro.presidencymt.eu/#/text.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/mozilla/TTS.

  6. 6.

    This slow down in latency is mostly caused by the Romanian TTS models that are based on HMMs.

  7. 7.

    RO \(\rightarrow \) EN: https://relate.racai.ro/index.php?path=translate/speech_ro_en EN \(\rightarrow \) RO: https://relate.racai.ro/index.php?path=translate/speech_en_ro.

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Acknowledgement

This work was realized in the context of the ROBIN project, a 38 months grant of the Ministry of Research and Innovation PCCDI-UEFISCDI, project code PN-III-P1-1.2-PCCDI-2017-734 within PNCDI III.

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Correspondence to Andrei-Marius Avram .

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Avram, AM., Păiş, V., Tufiş, D. (2021). A Modular Approach for Romanian-English Speech Translation. In: Métais, E., Meziane, F., Horacek, H., Kapetanios, E. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12801. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80599-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80599-9_6

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