IIIT-BGP IWSLT 2026 Systems for Low-resource ST

Researchers from IIIT-BGP presented low-resource Bhojpuri-Hindi speech translation systems at IWSLT 2026, including an end-to-end model combining Wav2Vec2 and NLLB-200 with a lightweight adapter, and a cascaded system using Whisper and NLLB-200 with QE Fusion. The systems address the challenge of translating low-resource languages, achieving improved performance through adapter-based integration and quality estimation.

Abstract We present low-resource Bhojpuri-Hindi speech translation systems for the IWSLT 2026 shared task, covering both end-to-end and cascaded settings. Our end-to-end model connects a Bhojpuri-finetuned Wav2Vec2 encoder to a pretrained NLLB-200 decoder via a lightweight interconnection adapter that combines learnable layer aggregation, CNN-based temporal compression, and Transformer refinement, with optional LoRA-based decoder adaptation. For our cascaded system, we finetune Whisper for Bhojpuri ASR and NLLB-200 for Hindi MT, and further apply QE Fusion with COMET-Kiwi to improve translation selection from beam candidates.- Anthology ID: - 2026.iwslt-1.31 - Volume: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Spoken Language Translation IWSLT 2026 /volumes/2026.iwslt-1/ - Month: - July - Year: - 2026 - Address: - San Diego, USA in-person and online - Editors: Elizabeth Salesky /people/elizabeth-salesky/ , Antonios Anastasopoulos /people/antonios-anastasopoulos/ , Matteo Negri /people/matteo-negri/ , Marcello Federico /people/marcello-federico/ - Venues: IWSLT /venues/iwslt/ | WS /venues/ws/ - SIG: SIGSLT /sigs/sigslt/ - Publisher: - Association for Computational Linguistics - Note: - Pages: - 272–283 - Language: - URL: https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.31/ https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.31/ - DOI: - Cite ACL : - Kaustuk Pratap Singh, Dipanshu ., Vedant Singh, and Kumar Rishu. 2026. IIIT-BGP IWSLT 2026 Systems for Low-resource ST https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.31/ . In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Spoken Language Translation IWSLT 2026 , pages 272–283, San Diego, USA in-person and online . Association for Computational Linguistics. - Cite Informal : IIIT-BGP IWSLT 2026 Systems for Low-resource ST https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.31/ Singh et al., IWSLT 2026 - PDF: https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.31.pdf https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.31.pdf