NLP

SONAR EXPRESSIVE: Zero-shot Expressive Speech-to-Speech Translation

November 29, 2023

Abstract

Massively multilingual and multimodal sentence representations like SONAR are usually trained to capture only the meaning of the encoded text or speech. We complement this semantic embedding by a generic speech characteristic embedding which captures the expressive properties of a speech signal. We describe an iterative training procedure which aims to disentangle the semantics and expressive speech properties, and which does not need labeled data. We show the effectiveness of our method on the FLEURS and mExpresso benchmark test sets using multiple metrics which aim to measure the preservation of the meaning and prosody for zero-shot speech-to-speech translation from five languages into English.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Holger Schwenk

Alexandre Mourachko

Kevin Heffernan

Paul-Ambroise Duquenne

Benoit Sagot (INRIA)

Publisher

arXiv

Related Publications

May 20, 2026

HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

RESEARCH

EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data

Alvin W. M. Tan, Nicolas Hamilakis, Manel Khentout, Sho Tsuji, Balázs Kégl, Michael C. Frank, Angel Villar Corrales, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Dongyan Lin, Emmanuel Dupoux, Jiayi Shen, Juan Pino, Mahi Luthra, Martin Gleize, Phillip Rust, Rashel Moritz, Sheila Krogh-Jespersen, Surya Parimi, Tom Fizycki, Vanessa Stark, Yosuke Higuchi, Youssef Benchekroun

May 20, 2026

May 18, 2026

CONVERSATIONAL AI

RESEARCH

GIM: Evaluating models via tasks that integrate multiple cognitive domains

Alexandre Rezende, Rohit Patel, Steven McClain

May 18, 2026

May 12, 2026

HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

RESEARCH

NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI

Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Hubert Jacob Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Sophia Houhamdi, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit

May 12, 2026

May 04, 2026

NLP

Compute Optimal Tokenization

Sachin Mehta, Alisa Liu, Margaret Li, Artidoro Pagnoni, Gargi Ghosh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Mike Lewis, Srini Iyer, Tomasz Limisiewicz

May 04, 2026

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.