Title: Sequence-to-Sequence Models Can Directly Translate Foreign Speech,
Abstract: We present a recurrent encoder-decoder deep neural network architecture that
directly translates speech in one language into text in another. The model does
not explicitly transcribe the speech into text in the source language, nor does
it require supervision from the ground truth source language transcription
during training. We apply a slightly modified sequence-to-sequence with
attention architecture that has previously been used for speech recognition and
show that it can be repurposed for this more complex task, illustrating the
power of attention-based models. A single model trained end-to-end obtains
state-of-the-art performance on the Fisher Callhome Spanish-English speech
translation task, outperforming a cascade of independently trained
sequence-to-sequence speech recognition and machine translation models by 1.8
BLEU points on the Fisher test set. In addition, we find that making use of the
training data in both languages by multi-task training sequence-to-sequence
speech translation and recognition models with a shared encoder network can
improve performance by a further 1.4 BLEU points.