Inverted projection for robust speech translation

Abstract

The technology provides an approach to train translation models that are robust to transcription errors and punctuation errors. The approach includes introducing errors from actual automatic speech recognition and automatic punctuation systems into the source side of the machine translation training data. A method for training a machine translation model includes performing automatic speech recognition on input source audio to generate a system transcript. The method aligns a human transcript of the source audio to the system transcript, including projecting system segmentation onto the human transcript. Then the method performs segment robustness training of a machine translation model according to the aligned human and system transcripts, and performs system robustness training of the machine translation model, e.g., by injecting token errors into training data.