Qianqian Dong


2024

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FINDINGS OF THE IWSLT 2024 EVALUATION CAMPAIGN
Ibrahim Said Ahmad | Antonios Anastasopoulos | Ondřej Bojar | Claudia Borg | Marine Carpuat | Roldano Cattoni | Mauro Cettolo | William Chen | Qianqian Dong | Marcello Federico | Barry Haddow | Dávid Javorský | Mateusz Krubiński | Tsz Kim Lam | Xutai Ma | Prashant Mathur | Evgeny Matusov | Chandresh Maurya | John McCrae | Kenton Murray | Satoshi Nakamura | Matteo Negri | Jan Niehues | Xing Niu | Atul Kr. Ojha | John Ortega | Sara Papi | Peter Polák | Adam Pospíšil | Pavel Pecina | Elizabeth Salesky | Nivedita Sethiya | Balaram Sarkar | Jiatong Shi | Claytone Sikasote | Matthias Sperber | Sebastian Stüker | Katsuhito Sudoh | Brian Thompson | Alex Waibel | Shinji Watanabe | Patrick Wilken | Petr Zemánek | Rodolfo Zevallos
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2024)

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 21st IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 7 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing, speech-to-speech translation, dialect and low-resource speech translation, and Indic languages. The shared tasks attracted 17 teams whose submissions are documented in 27 system papers. The growing interest towards spoken language translation is also witnessed by the constantly increasing number of shared task organizers and contributors to the overview paper, almost evenly distributed across industry and academia.

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Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for End-to-end Speech Translation
Yunlong Zhao | Kexin Wang | Qianqian Dong | Tom Ko
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Recently, end-to-end speech translation (ST) has gained significant attention in research, but its progress is hindered by the limited availability of labeled data. To overcome this challenge, leveraging pre-trained models for knowledge transfer in ST has emerged as a promising direction. In this paper, we propose PETL-ST, which investigates parameter-efficient transfer learning for end-to-end speech translation. Our method utilizes two lightweight adaptation techniques, namely prefix and adapter, to modulate Attention and the Feed-Forward Network, respectively, while preserving the capabilities of pre-trained models. We conduct experiments on MuST-C En-De, Es, Fr, Ru datasets to evaluate the performance of our approach. The results demonstrate that PETL-ST outperforms strong baselines, achieving superior translation quality with high parameter efficiency. Moreover, our method exhibits remarkable data efficiency and significantly improves performance in low-resource settings.

2023

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CTC-based Non-autoregressive Speech Translation
Chen Xu | Xiaoqian Liu | Xiaowen Liu | Qingxuan Sun | Yuhao Zhang | Murun Yang | Qianqian Dong | Tom Ko | Mingxuan Wang | Tong Xiao | Anxiang Ma | Jingbo Zhu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Combining end-to-end speech translation (ST) and non-autoregressive (NAR) generation is promising in language and speech processing for their advantages of less error propagation and low latency. In this paper, we investigate the potential of connectionist temporal classification (CTC) for non-autoregressive speech translation (NAST).In particular, we develop a model consisting of two encoders that are guided by CTC to predict the source and target texts, respectively. Introducing CTC into NAST on both language sides has obvious challenges: 1) the conditional independent generation somewhat breaks the interdependency among tokens, and 2) the monotonic alignment assumption in standard CTC does not hold in translation tasks. In response, we develop a prediction-aware encoding approach and a cross-layer attention approach to address these issues. We also use curriculum learning to improve convergence of training. Experiments on the MuST-C ST benchmarks show that our NAST model achieves an average BLEU score of 29.5 with a speed-up of 5.67×, which is comparable to the autoregressive counterpart and even outperforms the previous best result of 0.9 BLEU points.

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MOSPC: MOS Prediction Based on Pairwise Comparison
Kexin Wang | Yunlong Zhao | Qianqian Dong | Tom Ko | Mingxuan Wang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

As a subjective metric to evaluate the quality of synthesized speech, Mean opinion score(MOS) usually requires multiple annotators to score the same speech. Such an annotation approach requires a lot of manpower and is also time-consuming. MOS prediction model for automatic evaluation can significantly reduce labor cost. In previous works, it is difficult to accurately rank the quality of speech when the MOS scores are close. However, in practical applications, it is more important to correctly rank the quality of synthesis systems or sentences than simply predicting MOS scores. Meanwhile, as each annotator scores multiple audios during annotation, the score is probably a relative value based on the first or the first few speech scores given by the annotator. Motivated by the above two points, we propose a general framework for MOS prediction based on pair comparison (MOSPC), and we utilize C-Mixup algorithm to enhance the generalization performance of MOSPC.The experiments on BVCC and VCC2018 show that our framework outperforms the baselines on most of the correlation coefficient metrics, especially on the metric KTAU related to quality ranking. And our framework also surpasses the strong baseline in ranking accuracy on each fine-grained segment. These results indicate that our framework contributes to improving the ranking accuracy of speech quality.

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FINDINGS OF THE IWSLT 2023 EVALUATION CAMPAIGN
Milind Agarwal | Sweta Agrawal | Antonios Anastasopoulos | Luisa Bentivogli | Ondřej Bojar | Claudia Borg | Marine Carpuat | Roldano Cattoni | Mauro Cettolo | Mingda Chen | William Chen | Khalid Choukri | Alexandra Chronopoulou | Anna Currey | Thierry Declerck | Qianqian Dong | Kevin Duh | Yannick Estève | Marcello Federico | Souhir Gahbiche | Barry Haddow | Benjamin Hsu | Phu Mon Htut | Hirofumi Inaguma | Dávid Javorský | John Judge | Yasumasa Kano | Tom Ko | Rishu Kumar | Pengwei Li | Xutai Ma | Prashant Mathur | Evgeny Matusov | Paul McNamee | John P. McCrae | Kenton Murray | Maria Nadejde | Satoshi Nakamura | Matteo Negri | Ha Nguyen | Jan Niehues | Xing Niu | Atul Kr. Ojha | John E. Ortega | Proyag Pal | Juan Pino | Lonneke van der Plas | Peter Polák | Elijah Rippeth | Elizabeth Salesky | Jiatong Shi | Matthias Sperber | Sebastian Stüker | Katsuhito Sudoh | Yun Tang | Brian Thompson | Kevin Tran | Marco Turchi | Alex Waibel | Mingxuan Wang | Shinji Watanabe | Rodolfo Zevallos
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2023)

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 20th IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 9 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing, speech-to-speech translation, multilingual, dialect and low-resource speech translation, and formality control. The shared tasks attracted a total of 38 submissions by 31 teams. The growing interest towards spoken language translation is also witnessed by the constantly increasing number of shared task organizers and contributors to the overview paper, almost evenly distributed across industry and academia.

2021

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NeurST: Neural Speech Translation Toolkit
Chengqi Zhao | Mingxuan Wang | Qianqian Dong | Rong Ye | Lei Li
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

NeurST is an open-source toolkit for neural speech translation. The toolkit mainly focuses on end-to-end speech translation, which is easy to use, modify, and extend to advanced speech translation research and products. NeurST aims at facilitating the speech translation research for NLP researchers and building reliable benchmarks for this field. It provides step-by-step recipes for feature extraction, data preprocessing, distributed training, and evaluation. In this paper, we will introduce the framework design of NeurST and show experimental results for different benchmark datasets, which can be regarded as reliable baselines for future research. The toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/bytedance/neurst and we will continuously update the performance of with other counterparts and studies at https://st-benchmark.github.io/.

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The Volctrans Neural Speech Translation System for IWSLT 2021
Chengqi Zhao | Zhicheng Liu | Jian Tong | Tao Wang | Mingxuan Wang | Rong Ye | Qianqian Dong | Jun Cao | Lei Li
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2021)

This paper describes the systems submitted to IWSLT 2021 by the Volctrans team. We participate in the offline speech translation and text-to-text simultaneous translation tracks. For offline speech translation, our best end-to-end model achieves 7.9 BLEU improvements over the benchmark on the MuST-C test set and is even approaching the results of a strong cascade solution. For text-to-text simultaneous translation, we explore the best practice to optimize the wait-k model. As a result, our final submitted systems exceed the benchmark at around 7 BLEU on the same latency regime. We release our code and model to facilitate both future research works and industrial applications.

2020

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CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark
Liang Xu | Hai Hu | Xuanwei Zhang | Lu Li | Chenjie Cao | Yudong Li | Yechen Xu | Kai Sun | Dian Yu | Cong Yu | Yin Tian | Qianqian Dong | Weitang Liu | Bo Shi | Yiming Cui | Junyi Li | Jun Zeng | Rongzhao Wang | Weijian Xie | Yanting Li | Yina Patterson | Zuoyu Tian | Yiwen Zhang | He Zhou | Shaoweihua Liu | Zhe Zhao | Qipeng Zhao | Cong Yue | Xinrui Zhang | Zhengliang Yang | Kyle Richardson | Zhenzhong Lan
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

The advent of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks for English, such as GLUE and SuperGLUE allows new NLU models to be evaluated across a diverse set of tasks. These comprehensive benchmarks have facilitated a broad range of research and applications in natural language processing (NLP). The problem, however, is that most such benchmarks are limited to English, which has made it difficult to replicate many of the successes in English NLU for other languages. To help remedy this issue, we introduce the first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark. CLUE is an open-ended, community-driven project that brings together 9 tasks spanning several well-established single-sentence/sentence-pair classification tasks, as well as machine reading comprehension, all on original Chinese text. To establish results on these tasks, we report scores using an exhaustive set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models (9 in total). We also introduce a number of supplementary datasets and additional tools to help facilitate further progress on Chinese NLU. Our benchmark is released at https://www.cluebenchmarks.com

2018

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Semi-Supervised Disfluency Detection
Feng Wang | Wei Chen | Zhen Yang | Qianqian Dong | Shuang Xu | Bo Xu
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

While the disfluency detection has achieved notable success in the past years, it still severely suffers from the data scarcity. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel semi-supervised approach which can utilize large amounts of unlabelled data. In this work, a light-weight neural net is proposed to extract the hidden features based solely on self-attention without any Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) or Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In addition, we use the unlabelled corpus to enhance the performance. Besides, the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) training is applied to enforce the similar distribution between the labelled and unlabelled data. The experimental results show that our approach achieves significant improvements over strong baselines.
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