Constructing EPTIC: A Modular Pipeline and an Evaluation of ASR for Verbatim Transcription
This paper presents a novel pipeline for constructing multimodal and multilingual parallel corpora, with a focus on evaluating state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition tools for verbatim transcription. Our findings indicate that current technologies can streamline corpus construction, with fine-tuning showing promising results in terms of transcription quality compared to out-of-the-box Whisper models.
Dec 6, 2024
Expanding the European Parliament Translation and Interpreting Corpus: A Modular Pipeline for the Construction of Complex Corpora
The present paper introduces an expanded version of the European Parliament Translation and Interpreting Corpus (EPTIC), a multimodal parallel corpus comprising speeches delivered at the European Parliament along with their official interpretations and translations (see Bernardini et al., 2016; Bernardini et al., 2018). Constructing multimodal and parallel corpora for translation and interpreting studies (TIS) has been acknowledged as a “formidable task” (Bernardini et al., 2018), which – if automated, as we propose – involves a number of subtasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), multilingual sentence alignment, and forced alignment, each of which poses its own challenges. Yet tackling these subtasks also offers a unique way to evaluate state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) tools against a unique, multilingual benchmark. In this paper we discuss the development of a modular pipeline adaptable for each of these subtasks and address the broader implications of this work for the field of corpus construction.
Sep 15, 2024