Alfons Juan

CL
h-index23
6papers
1,972citations
Novelty31%
AI Score28

6 Papers

32.0CLMar 4, 2022
From Simultaneous to Streaming Machine Translation by Leveraging Streaming History

Javier Iranzo-Sánchez, Jorge Civera, Alfons Juan

Simultaneous Machine Translation is the task of incrementally translating an input sentence before it is fully available. Currently, simultaneous translation is carried out by translating each sentence independently of the previously translated text. More generally, Streaming MT can be understood as an extension of Simultaneous MT to the incremental translation of a continuous input text stream. In this work, a state-of-the-art simultaneous sentence-level MT system is extended to the streaming setup by leveraging the streaming history. Extensive empirical results are reported on IWSLT Translation Tasks, showing that leveraging the streaming history leads to significant quality gains. In particular, the proposed system proves to compare favorably to the best performing systems.

8.5CLSep 26, 2023Code
Segmentation-Free Streaming Machine Translation

Javier Iranzo-Sánchez, Jorge Iranzo-Sánchez, Adrià Giménez et al.

Streaming Machine Translation (MT) is the task of translating an unbounded input text stream in real-time. The traditional cascade approach, which combines an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and an MT system, relies on an intermediate segmentation step which splits the transcription stream into sentence-like units. However, the incorporation of a hard segmentation constrains the MT system and is a source of errors. This paper proposes a Segmentation-Free framework that enables the model to translate an unsegmented source stream by delaying the segmentation decision until the translation has been generated. Extensive experiments show how the proposed Segmentation-Free framework has better quality-latency trade-off than competing approaches that use an independent segmentation model. Software, data and models will be released upon paper acceptance.

17.0CLJun 15
MLLP-VRAIN UPV system for the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation task

Jorge Iranzo-Sánchez, Gerard Mas-Mollà, Adrià Giménez et al.

This work describes the participation of the MLLP-VRAIN research group in the shared task of the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation track. Our submission utilizes the recently released Parakeet and Qwen 3.5 models to create a robust, cascaded solution for long-form SimulST through the use of adaptive "black-box" policies. We explore relaxations of these policies to achieve better quality-latency trade-offs. Compared to last year, we participate on all language directions. In addition to this, for the En$\rightarrow${De, It, Zh} directions we also participate in this year's new context track employing a combination of ASR word-boosting and a RAG mechanism of offline pre-translated exemplars to guide generation and enrich our system with domain-specific context. Finally, we provide a detailed latency analysis of our system. Compared to last year, results on the MCIF En$\rightarrow$De test set shows a substantial quality improvement of +5.82 XCOMET-XL. Our context track processing further improves performance by +1.03.

7.3SDOct 29, 2021
VRAIN-UPV MLLP's system for the Blizzard Challenge 2021

Alejandro Pérez-González-de-Martos, Albert Sanchis, Alfons Juan

This paper presents the VRAIN-UPV MLLP's speech synthesis system for the SH1 task of the Blizzard Challenge 2021. The SH1 task consisted in building a Spanish text-to-speech system trained on (but not limited to) the corpus released by the Blizzard Challenge 2021 organization. It included 5 hours of studio-quality recordings from a native Spanish female speaker. In our case, this dataset was solely used to build a two-stage neural text-to-speech pipeline composed of a non-autoregressive acoustic model with explicit duration modeling and a HiFi-GAN neural vocoder. Our team is identified as J in the evaluation results. Our system obtained very good results in the subjective evaluation tests. Only one system among other 11 participants achieved better naturalness than ours. Concretely, it achieved a naturalness MOS of 3.61 compared to 4.21 for real samples.

30.8CLApr 18, 2021Code
Stream-level Latency Evaluation for Simultaneous Machine Translation

Javier Iranzo-Sánchez, Jorge Civera, Alfons Juan

Simultaneous machine translation has recently gained traction thanks to significant quality improvements and the advent of streaming applications. Simultaneous translation systems need to find a trade-off between translation quality and response time, and with this purpose multiple latency measures have been proposed. However, latency evaluations for simultaneous translation are estimated at the sentence level, not taking into account the sequential nature of a streaming scenario. Indeed, these sentence-level latency measures are not well suited for continuous stream translation resulting in figures that are not coherent with the simultaneous translation policy of the system being assessed. This work proposes a stream-level adaptation of the current latency measures based on a re-segmentation approach applied to the output translation, that is successfully evaluated on streaming conditions for a reference IWSLT task.

9.4CLNov 8, 2019
Europarl-ST: A Multilingual Corpus For Speech Translation Of Parliamentary Debates

Javier Iranzo-Sánchez, Joan Albert Silvestre-Cerdà, Javier Jorge et al.

Current research into spoken language translation (SLT),or speech-to-text translation, is often hampered by the lack of specific data resources for this task, as currently available SLT datasets are restricted to a limited set of language pairs. In this paper we present Europarl-ST, a novel multilingual SLT corpus containing paired audio-text samples for SLT from and into 6 European languages, for a total of 30 different translation directions. This corpus has been compiled using the debates held in the European Parliament in the period between 2008 and 2012. This paper describes the corpus creation process and presents a series of automatic speech recognition, machine translation and spoken language translation experiments that highlight the potential of this new resource. The corpus is released under a Creative Commons license and is freely accessible and downloadable.