On Using SpecAugment for End-to-End Speech Translation

11/20/2019

∙

by   Parnia Bahar, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

This work investigates a simple data augmentation technique, SpecAugment, for end-to-end speech translation. SpecAugment is a low-cost implementation method applied directly to the audio input features and it consists of masking blocks of frequency channels, and/or time steps. We apply SpecAugment on end-to-end speech translation tasks and achieve up to +2.2% on LibriSpeech Audiobooks En->Fr and +1.2 overfitting to some extent. We also examine the effectiveness of the method in a variety of data scenarios and show that the method also leads to significant improvements in various data conditions irrespective of the amount of training data.