Findings of the IWSLT 2024 Evaluation Campaign

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 21st IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 7 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing, speech-to-speech translation, dialect and low-resource speech translation, and Indic languages. The shared tasks attracted 18 teams whose submissions are documented in 26 system papers. The growing interest towards spoken language translation is also witnessed by the constantly increasing number of shared task organizers and contributors to the overview paper, almost evenly distributed across industry and academia.

Watermark Text Pattern Spotting in Document Images

Watermark text spotting in document images can offer access to an often unexplored source of information, providing crucial evidence about a record's scope, audience and sometimes even authenticity. Stemming from the problem of text spotting, detecting and understanding watermarks in documents inherits the same hardships - in the wild, writing can come in various fonts, sizes and forms, making generic recognition a very difficult problem. To address the lack of resources in this field and propel further research, we propose a novel benchmark (K-Watermark) containing 65,447 data samples generated using Wrender, a watermark text patterns rendering procedure. A validity study using humans raters yields an authenticity score of 0.51 against pre-generated watermarked documents. To prove the usefulness of the dataset and rendering technique, we developed an end-to-end solution (Wextract) for detecting the bounding box instances of watermark text, while predicting the depicted text. To deal with this specific task, we introduce a variance minimization loss and a hierarchical self-attention mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose an evaluation benchmark and a complete solution for retrieving watermarks from documents surpassing baselines by 5 AP points in detection and 4 points in character accuracy.