End-to-End Speech Translation with Knowledge Distillation
Table 2: ST results on Augmented LibriSpeech test. KD denotes knowledge distillation.
['LibriSpeech', 'Method', 'greedy', 'beam', 'ensemble']
Noticing that there exists a huge gap between the performance of the end-to-end ST model and MT model, even if the end-to-end ST model is pretrained, thus we conduct knowledge distillation to instruct ST model with MT model. The result shows that this method can bring significant improvement on the BLEU score which increases from 14.30 to 17.02. With the instruction of MT model, the performance gap is alleviated, approaching to the pipeline system. It demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.