@inproceedings{alastruey-etal-2024-speechalign,
    title = "{S}peech{A}lign: A Framework for Speech Translation Alignment Evaluation",
    author = "Alastruey, Belen  and
      Sant, Aleix  and
      G{\'a}llego, Gerard I.  and
      Dale, David  and
      Costa-juss{\`a}, Marta R.",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1316",
    pages = "15137--15146",
    abstract = "Speech-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text translation are currently dynamic areas of research. In our commitment to advance these fields, we present SpeechAlign, a framework designed to evaluate the underexplored field of source-target alignment in speech models. The SpeechAlign framework has two core components. First, to tackle the absence of suitable evaluation datasets, we introduce the Speech Gold Alignment dataset, built upon a English-German text translation gold alignment dataset. Secondly, we introduce two novel metrics, Speech Alignment Error Rate (SAER) and Time-weighted Speech Alignment Error Rate (TW-SAER), which enable the evaluation of alignment quality within speech models. While the former gives equal importance to each word, the latter assigns weights based on the length of the words in the speech signal. By publishing SpeechAlign we provide an accessible evaluation framework for model assessment, and we employ it to benchmark open-source Speech Translation models. In doing so, we contribute to the ongoing research progress within the fields of Speech-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text translation.",
}

Speech-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text translation are currently dynamic areas of research. In our commitment to advance these fields, we present SpeechAlign, a framework designed to evaluate the underexplored field of source-target alignment in speech models. The SpeechAlign framework has two core components. First, to tackle the absence of suitable evaluation datasets, we introduce the Speech Gold Alignment dataset, built upon a English-German text translation gold alignment dataset. Secondly, we introduce two novel metrics, Speech Alignment Error Rate (SAER) and Time-weighted Speech Alignment Error Rate (TW-SAER), which enable the evaluation of alignment quality within speech models. While the former gives equal importance to each word, the latter assigns weights based on the length of the words in the speech signal. By publishing SpeechAlign we provide an accessible evaluation framework for model assessment, and we employ it to benchmark open-source Speech Translation models. In doing so, we contribute to the ongoing research progress within the fields of Speech-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text translation.
Alastruey, Belen Sant, Aleix G{\'a}llego, Gerard I. Dale, David Costa-juss{\`a}, Marta R.
SpeechAlign: A Framework for Speech Translation Alignment Evaluation