Speech Translation Enhanced ASR for European Parliament Speeches - On the Influence of ASR Performance on Speech Translation

In this paper we describe our work in coupling automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) in a speech translation enhanced automatic speech recognition (STE-ASR) framework for transcribing and translating European parliament speeches. We demonstrate the influence of the quality of the ASR component on the MT performance, by comparing a series of WERs with the corresponding automatic translation scores. By porting an STE-ASR framework to the task at hand, we show how the word errors for transcribing English and Spanish speeches can be lowered by 3.0% and 4.8% relative, respectively.