End-to-End Evaluation for Low-Latency Simultaneous Speech Translation
This work addresses the need for standardized evaluation in low-latency speech translation research, which is incremental as it builds on existing methods but provides a novel framework for comparison.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating low-latency speech translation systems by proposing the first framework for end-to-end assessment under realistic conditions, enabling comparison of different approaches including cascaded and end-to-end systems with metrics for translation quality and latency.
The challenge of low-latency speech translation has recently draw significant interest in the research community as shown by several publications and shared tasks. Therefore, it is essential to evaluate these different approaches in realistic scenarios. However, currently only specific aspects of the systems are evaluated and often it is not possible to compare different approaches. In this work, we propose the first framework to perform and evaluate the various aspects of low-latency speech translation under realistic conditions. The evaluation is carried out in an end-to-end fashion. This includes the segmentation of the audio as well as the run-time of the different components. Secondly, we compare different approaches to low-latency speech translation using this framework. We evaluate models with the option to revise the output as well as methods with fixed output. Furthermore, we directly compare state-of-the-art cascaded as well as end-to-end systems. Finally, the framework allows to automatically evaluate the translation quality as well as latency and also provides a web interface to show the low-latency model outputs to the user.