Better Late Than Never: Meta-Evaluation of Latency Metrics for Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation

Peter Polák; Sara Papi; Luisa Bentivogli; Ondřej Bojar

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arXiv · 2509.17349

Better Late Than Never: Meta-Evaluation of Latency Metrics for Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation

Peter Polák·Sara Papi·Luisa Bentivogli·Ondřej Bojar

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Abstract

Simultaneous speech-to-text translation systems must balance translation quality with latency. Although quality evaluation is well established, latency measurement remains a challenge. Existing metrics produce inconsistent results, especially in short-form settings with artificial presegmentation. We present the first comprehensive meta-evaluation of latency metrics across language pairs and systems. We uncover a structural bias in current metrics related to segmentation. We introduce YAAL (Yet Another Average Lagging) for a more accurate short-form evaluation and LongYAAL for unsegmented audio. We propose SoftSegmenter, a resegmentation tool based on soft word-level alignment. We show that YAAL and LongYAAL, together with SoftSegmenter, outperform popular latency metrics, enabling more reliable assessments of short- and long-form simultaneous speech translation systems. We implement all artifacts within the OmniSTEval toolkit: https://github.com/pe-trik/OmniSTEval.

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Peter Polák, Sara Papi, Luisa Bentivogli, Ondřej Bojar. 2025-09-22. Better Late Than Never: Meta-Evaluation of Latency Metrics for Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17349

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