Translating from languages without productive grammatical gender like English into gender-marked languages is a well-known difficulty for machines. This difficulty is also due to the fact that the training data on which models are built typically reflect the asymmetries of natural languages, gender bias included. Exclusively fed with textual data, machine translation is intrinsically constrained by the fact that the input sentence does not always contain clues about the gender identity of the referred human entities. But what happens with speech translation, where the input is an audio signal? Can audio provide additional information to reduce gender bias? We present the first thorough investigation of gender bias in speech translation, contributing with: i) the release of a benchmark useful for future studies, and ii) the comparison of different technologies (cascade and end-to-end) on two language directions (English-Italian/French).

The evaluation campaign of the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2020) featured this year six challenge tracks: (i) Simultaneous speech translation, (ii) Video speech translation, (iii) Offline speech translation, (iv) Conversational speech translation, (v) Open domain translation, and (vi) Non-native speech translation. A total of teams participated in at least one of the tracks. This paper introduces each track’s goal, data and evaluation metrics, and reports the results of the received submissions.