In plain words: A system sorts speech in a low-resource language by topic after training on 20 hours of speech paired with translations, using a translation tool that turns speech into words. It labels one-minute clips correctly 20% more often than always guessing the most common topic.
Abstract · Cross-lingual topic prediction for speech using translations
Given a large amount of unannotated speech in a low-resource language, can we classify the speech utterances by topic? We consider this question in the setting where a small amount of speech in the low-resource language is paired with text translations in a high-resource language. We develop an effective cross-lingual topic classifier by training on just 20 hours of translated speech, using a recent model for direct speech-to-text translation. While the translations are poor, they are still good enough to correctly classify the topic of 1-minute speech segments over 70% of the time - a 20% improvement over a majority-class baseline. Such a system could be useful for humanitarian applications like crisis response, where incoming speech in a foreign low-resource language must be quickly assessed for further action.
Sameer Bansal, Herman Kamper, Adam Lopez, Sharon Goldwater
arXiv:1908.11425 · cs.CL · submitted Aug 29, 2019 · updated Mar 29, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to ICASSP 2020