Indic-TEDST: Datasets and Baselines for Low-Resource Speech to Text Translation

Abstract

Speech-to-text (ST) task is the translation of speech in a language to text in a different language. It has use cases in subtitling, dubbing, etc. Traditionally, ST tasks have been solved by cascading automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) models which leads to error propagation, high latency, and training time. To minimize such issues, end-to-end models have been proposed recently. However, we find that only a few works have reported results of ST models on a limited number of low-resource languages. To take a step further in this direction, we release datasets and baselines for low-resource ST tasks. Concretely, our dataset has 9 language pairs and benchmarking has been done against SOTA ST models. The low performance of SOTA ST models on Indic-TEDST data indicates the necessity of the development of ST models specifically designed for low-resource languages. © 2024 ELRA Language Resource Association: CC BY-NC 4.0.