{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/waco-word-aligned-contrastive-learning-for","title":"WACO: Word-Aligned Contrastive Learning for Speech Translation","arxiv_id":"2212.09359","date":"2022-12-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Siqi Ouyang","Rong Ye","Lei LI"],"abstract":"End-to-end Speech Translation (E2E ST) aims to directly translate source speech into target text. Existing ST methods perform poorly when only extremely small speech-text data are available for training. We observe that an ST model's performance closely correlates with its embedding similarity between speech and source transcript. In this paper, we propose Word-Aligned COntrastive learning (WACO), a simple and effective method for extremely low-resource speech-to-text translation. Our key idea is bridging word-level representations for both speech and text modalities via contrastive learning. We evaluate WACO and other methods on the MuST-C dataset, a widely used ST benchmark, and on a low-resource direction Maltese-English from IWSLT 2023. Our experiments demonstrate that WACO outperforms the best baseline by 9+ BLEU points with only 1-hour parallel ST data. Code is available at https://github.com/owaski/WACO.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09359v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.09359v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"waco-word-aligned-contrastive-learning-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/owaski/waco","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"contrastive-learning","task_name":"Contrastive Learning"},{"task_slug":"speech-to-text","task_name":"Speech-to-Text"},{"task_slug":"speech-to-text-translation","task_name":"Speech-to-Text Translation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"contrastive-learning","method_name":"Contrastive Learning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2212.09359","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}