A Holistic Cascade System, benchmark, and Human Evaluation Protocol for Expressive Speech-to-Speech Translation

• Main Authors: Huang, Wen-Chin, Peloquin, Benjamin, Kao, Justine, Wang, Changhan, Gong, Hongyu, Salesky, Elizabeth, Adi, Yossi, Lee, Ann, Chen, Peng-Jen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 25.01.2023
• Subjects: Computer Science - Computation and Language; Computer Science - Sound
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2301.10606

Expressive speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) aims to transfer prosodic attributes of source speech to target speech while maintaining translation accuracy. Existing research in expressive S2ST is limited, typically focusing on a single expressivity aspect at a time. Likewise, this research area lacks standard evaluation protocols and well-curated benchmark datasets. In this work, we propose a holistic cascade system for expressive S2ST, combining multiple prosody transfer techniques previously considered only in isolation. We curate a benchmark expressivity test set in the TV series domain and explored a second dataset in the audiobook domain. Finally, we present a human evaluation protocol to assess multiple expressive dimensions across speech pairs. Experimental results indicate that bi-lingual annotators can assess the quality of expressive preservation in S2ST systems, and the holistic modeling approach outperforms single-aspect systems. Audio samples can be accessed through our demo webpage: https://facebookresearch.github.io/speech_translation/cascade_expressive_s2st.