2026.iwslt-1.18@ACL

Total: 1

#1 CATENG Submission for the IWSLT 2026: Dialectal and Low-resource Speech Translation Task [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Rodolfo Joel Zevallos, Marc Casals, John E. Ortega, Fabrício Carraro, Pol Buitrago, Guillermo Cámbara

We present the CATENG systems submitted to the IWSLT 2026 Dialectal and Low-Resource Speech Translation shared task for the Catalan–English (CA–EN) pair. Although Catalan is not strictly low-resource, its dialectal diversity and relative under-representation in speech technology make it a challenging setting. We evaluate three unconstrained systems: two cascaded approaches combining ASR and MT, and one end-to-end model. Our primary system uses a Mamba-based ASR (ConMamba) with a fine-tuned NLLB-200 MT model, while a contrastive system replaces the ASR with Whisper-v3; we also evaluate an end-to-end SpeechT5 model with data augmentation. Experiments are conducted on the IWSLT 2026 Catalan dataset (15 hours), complemented with large-scale parallel text. Results show that cascaded systems outperform end-to-end ST, with Whisper-v3 + NLLB achieving 44.7 BLEU and 65.1 chrF. We find that performance is primarily constrained by ASR quality rather than MT capacity, and that Mamba-based ASR models provide competitive results, highlighting the importance of robust speech representations and dialectal coverage for Catalan–English speech translation.

Subject: IWSLT.2026