Previous work has shown that for low-resource source languages, automatic speech-to-text translation (AST) can be improved by pretraining an end-to-end model on automatic speech recognition (ASR) data from a high-resource language. However, it is not clear what factors --e.g., language relatedness or size of the pretraining data-- yield the biggest improvements, or whether pretraining can be effectively combined with other methods such as data augmentation. Here, we experiment with pretraining on datasets of varying sizes, including languages related and unrelated to the AST source language. We find that the best predictor of final AST performance is the word error rate of the pretrained ASR model, and that differences in ASR/AST performance correlate with how phonetic information is encoded in the later RNN layers of our model. We also show that pretraining and data augmentation yield complementary benefits for AST.

本文探讨了如何提高低资源语言的自动语音翻译质量，研究表明在高资源语言上训练端到端自动语音识别模型可以有效提高自动语音译文质量，作者发现最终自动语音译文质量的最佳预测因素是预训练的ASR模型的词错误率，并且研究发现预训练和数据增强对AST翻译质量的提高是互补的。

低资源语音识别预训练的分析