OpenSTBench: Beyond Semantic Evaluation for Speech Translation
This work provides a comprehensive and reproducible evaluation protocol for researchers and developers in speech translation, enabling a more holistic comparison of diverse systems beyond semantic evaluation.
The paper introduces OpenSTBench, a unified multidimensional evaluation framework for speech translation systems. It addresses the challenge of comparing heterogeneous systems by jointly evaluating translation quality, speech quality, speaker preservation, emotion and paralinguistic fidelity, temporal consistency, and latency across S2TT and S2ST in offline and streaming settings. Experiments show that systems with strong translation quality can still vary significantly in speech and temporal quality.
Speech translation systems increasingly span speech-to-text translation (S2TT), speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), offline translation, and streaming generation, producing outputs that differ in modality, speech realization, and timing behavior. Existing evaluation practices assess important aspects such as translation quality, speech quality, and temporal quality, but these aspects are often evaluated under separate protocols, making it difficult to compare heterogeneous systems comprehensively. To address this gap, we present OpenSTBench, a unified multidimensional evaluation framework that organizes heterogeneous speech translation outputs into a shared evaluation format. OpenSTBench supports both S2TT and S2ST systems in offline and streaming settings, and jointly evaluates translation quality, speech quality, speaker preservation, emotion and paralinguistic fidelity, temporal consistency, and latency. Through experiments on representative speech translation systems, we show that systems with strong translation quality can still differ substantially in speech quality, as well as in temporal quality. OpenSTBench provides a reproducible protocol for analyzing these cross-dimensional differences and supporting application-oriented comparison of speech translation systems. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/sjtuayj/OpenSTBench.