Speech Translation with Style: AppTek’s Submissions to the IWSLT Subtitling and Formality Tracks in 2023

Parnia Bahar, Patrick Wilken, Javier Iranzo-Sánchez, Mattia Di Gangi, Evgeny Matusov, Zoltán Tüske


Abstract
AppTek participated in the subtitling and formality tracks of the IWSLT 2023 evaluation. This paper describes the details of our subtitling pipeline - speech segmentation, speech recognition, punctuation prediction and inverse text normalization, text machine translation and direct speech-to-text translation, intelligent line segmentation - and how we make use of the provided subtitling-specific data in training and fine-tuning. The evaluation results show that our final submissions are competitive, in particular outperforming the submissions by other participants by 5% absolute as measured by the SubER subtitle quality metric. For the formality track, we participate with our En-Ru and En-Pt production models, which support formality control via prefix tokens. Except for informal Portuguese, we achieve near perfect formality level accuracy while at the same time offering high general translation quality.
Anthology ID:
2023.iwslt-1.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2023)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada (in-person and online)
Editors:
Elizabeth Salesky, Marcello Federico, Marine Carpuat
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
251–260
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.iwslt-1.22
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.iwslt-1.22
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Parnia Bahar, Patrick Wilken, Javier Iranzo-Sánchez, Mattia Di Gangi, Evgeny Matusov, and Zoltán Tüske. 2023. Speech Translation with Style: AppTek’s Submissions to the IWSLT Subtitling and Formality Tracks in 2023. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2023), pages 251–260, Toronto, Canada (in-person and online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Speech Translation with Style: AppTek’s Submissions to the IWSLT Subtitling and Formality Tracks in 2023 (Bahar et al., IWSLT 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.iwslt-1.22.pdf