MockConf: A Student Interpretation Dataset: Analysis, Word- and Span-level Alignment and Baselines

Dávid Javorský, Ondřej Bojar, François Yvon


Abstract
In simultaneous interpreting, an interpreter renders the speech into another language with a very short lag, much sooner than sentences are finished. In order to understand and later reproduce this dynamic and complex task automatically, we need specialized datasets and tools for analysis, monitoring, and evaluation, such as parallel speech corpora, and tools for their automatic annotation. Existing parallel corpora of translated texts and associated alignment algorithms hardly fill this gap, as they fail to model long-range interactions between speech segments or specific types of divergences (e.g. shortening, simplification, functional generalization) between the original and interpreted speeches. In this work, we develop and explore MockConf, a student interpretation dataset that was collected from Mock Conferences run as part of the students’ curriculum. This dataset contains 7 hours of recordings in 5 European languages, transcribed and aligned at the level of spans and words. We further implement and release InterAlign, a modern web-based annotation tool for parallel word and span annotations on long inputs, suitable for aligning simultaneous interpreting. We propose metrics for the evaluation and a baseline for automatic alignment. Dataset and tools will be released to the community.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.797
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16339–16356
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.797/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dávid Javorský, Ondřej Bojar, and François Yvon. 2025. MockConf: A Student Interpretation Dataset: Analysis, Word- and Span-level Alignment and Baselines. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 16339–16356, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MockConf: A Student Interpretation Dataset: Analysis, Word- and Span-level Alignment and Baselines (Javorský et al., ACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.797.pdf