SONAR

[Paper] [Demo]

We introduce SONAR, a new multilingual and multimodal fixed-size sentence embedding space, with a full suite of speech and text encoders and decoders. It substantially outperforms existing sentence embeddings such as LASER3 and LabSE on the xsim and xsim++ multilingual similarity search tasks.

Speech segments can be embedded in the same SONAR embedding space using language-specific speech encoders trained in a teacher-student setting on speech transcription data. We also provide a single text decoder, which allows us to perform text-to-text and speech-to-text machine translation, including for zero-shot language and modality combinations.

SONAR stands for Sentence-level multimOdal and laNguage-Agnostic Representations

The full list of supported languages (along with download links) can be found here

SONAR Architecture:

Model inference support thanks Fairseq2 (TODO: change for external link once released)

Text results

Speech results

Installing

You can install SONAR with pip install sonar-space. Note that there is another sonar package on pip that IS NOT this project, make sure to use sonar-space in your dependencies.

If you want to install SONAR manually, you can install it localy. SONAR depends mainly on Fairseq2 and can be installed using (tested with python=3.8)

pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -e .

If fairseq2 does not provide a build for your machine, check the readme of that project to build it localy.

Usage

fairseq2 will automatically download models into your $TORCH_HOME/hub directory upon using the commands below.

Compute text sentence embeddings with SONAR:

from sonar.inference_pipelines.text import TextToEmbeddingModelPipeline
t2vec_model = TextToEmbeddingModelPipeline(encoder="text_sonar_basic_encoder",
                                           tokenizer="text_sonar_basic_encoder")
sentences = ['My name is SONAR.', 'I can embed the sentences into vectorial space.']
t2vec_model.predict(sentences, source_lang="eng_Latn").shape
# torch.Size([2, 1024])

Translate text with SONAR

from sonar.inference_pipelines.text import TextToTextModelPipeline
t2t_model = TextToTextModelPipeline(encoder="text_sonar_basic_encoder",
                                    decoder="text_sonar_basic_decoder",
                                    tokenizer="text_sonar_basic_encoder")  # tokenizer is attached to both encoder and decoder cards

sentences = ['My name is SONAR.', 'I can embed the sentences into vectorial space.']
t2t_model.predict(sentences, source_lang="eng_Latn", target_lang="fra_Latn")
# ['Mon nom est SONAR.', "Je peux intégrer les phrases dans l'espace vectoriel."]

Compute speech sentence embeddings with SONAR

from sonar.inference_pipelines.speech import SpeechToEmbeddingModelPipeline
s2vec_model = SpeechToEmbeddingModelPipeline(encoder="sonar_speech_encoder_eng")

s2vec_model.predict(["./tests/integration_tests/data/audio_files/audio_1.wav",
                     "./tests/integration_tests/data/audio_files/audio_2.wav"]).shape
# torch.Size([2, 1024])
import torchaudio
inp, sr = torchaudio.load("./tests/integration_tests/data/audio_files/audio_1.wav")
assert sr == 16000, "Sample rate should be 16kHz"

s2vec_model.predict([inp]).shape
# torch.Size([1, 1024])

Speech-to-text translation with SONAR

from sonar.inference_pipelines.speech import SpeechToTextModelPipeline

s2t_model = SpeechToTextModelPipeline(encoder="sonar_speech_encoder_eng",
                                      decoder="text_sonar_basic_decoder",
                                      tokenizer="text_sonar_basic_decoder")

import torchaudio
inp, sr = torchaudio.load("./tests/integration_tests/data/audio_files/audio_1.wav")
assert sr == 16000, "Sample rate should be 16kHz"

# passing loaded audio files
s2t_model.predict([inp], target_lang="eng_Latn")
# ['Television reports show white smoke coming from the plant.']

# passing multiple wav files 
s2t_model.predict(["./tests/integration_tests/data/audio_files/audio_1.wav",
                   "./tests/integration_tests/data/audio_files/audio_2.wav"], target_lang="eng_Latn")
# ['Television reports show white smoke coming from the plant.',
# 'These couples may choose to make an adoption plan for their baby.']

Predicting cross-lingual semantic similarity with BLASER 2 models

import torch
from sonar.models.blaser.loader import load_blaser_model

blaser_ref = load_blaser_model("blaser_st2st_ref_v2_0").eval()
blaser_qe = load_blaser_model("blaser_st2st_qe_v2_0").eval()
# BLASER-2 is supposed to work with SONAR speech and text embeddings,
# but we didn't include their extraction in this snippet, to keep it simple.
emb = torch.ones([1, 1024])
print(blaser_ref(src=emb, ref=emb, mt=emb).item())  # 5.2552
print(blaser_qe(src=emb, mt=emb).item())  # 4.9819

See more complete demo notebooks :

• sonar text2text similarity and translation
• sonar speech2text and other data pipeline examples

Supported languages and download links

The SONAR text encoder & decoder supports 200 languages. SONAR speech encoders support 37 languages.

Citation Information

Please cite the paper when referencing the SONAR embedding space, encoders and decoders as:

@misc{Duquenne:2023:sonar_arxiv,
  author = {Paul-Ambroise Duquenne and Holger Schwenk and Benoit Sagot},
  title = {{SONAR:} Sentence-Level Multimodal and Language-Agnostic Representations},
  publisher = {arXiv},
  year = {2023},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/unk},
}

Contributing

See the CONTRIBUTING file for how to help out.

License

SONAR code and models are CC-BY-NC-4.0 licensed. See LICENSE.md.