Direct Speech Translation for Automatic Subtitling
Authors: Sara Papi, Marco Gaido, Alina Karakanta, Mauro Cettolo, Matteo Negri, Marco Turchi
AI-generated Key Points
- Automatic subtitling involves translating speech into timed text while adhering to multiple space and time requirements
- Traditionally, this task has been addressed through a pipeline of separate elements dealing with transcription, translation, segmentation into subtitles, and predicting timestamps
- The authors propose the first direct automatic subtitling model that generates target language subtitles and their timestamps from the source speech in a single solution
- The system achieved better or competitive results compared to state-of-the-art cascaded models for named entities (NE) and numbers using EuroParl Interviews for testing
- The system struggled more with PERSON recognition compared to cascaded systems
- The authors tested their system on EC Short Documentaries test set and found that there was no clear winner among the systems since each model performed differently for different languages
- Overall, the authors' proposed system represents a significant step towards developing high-performing direct models for automatic subtitling without employing any ad-hoc decoding or training strategy aimed at reducing translation length or compressing information.
Abstract: Automatic subtitling is the task of automatically translating the speech of an audiovisual product into short pieces of timed text, in other words, subtitles and their corresponding timestamps. The generated subtitles need to conform to multiple space and time requirements (length, reading speed) while being synchronised with the speech and segmented in a way that facilitates comprehension. Given its considerable complexity, automatic subtitling has so far been addressed through a pipeline of elements that deal separately with transcribing, translating, segmenting into subtitles and predicting timestamps. In this paper, we propose the first direct automatic subtitling model that generates target language subtitles and their timestamps from the source speech in a single solution. Comparisons with state-of-the-art cascaded models trained with both in- and out-domain data show that our system provides high-quality subtitles while also being competitive in terms of conformity, with all the advantages of maintaining a single model.
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