Automatic Song Translation for Tonal Languages

Abstract

This paper develops automatic song translation (AST) for tonal languages and addresses the unique challenge of aligning words' tones with melody of a song in addition to conveying the original meaning. We propose three criteria for effective AST -- preserving meaning, singability and intelligibility -- and design metrics for these criteria. We develop a new benchmark for English--Mandarin song translation and develop an unsupervised AST system, Guided AliGnment for Automatic Song Translation (GagaST), which combines pre-training with three decoding constraints. Both automatic and human evaluations show GagaST successfully balances semantics and singability.