A-TASC: Asian TED-Based Automatic Subtitling Corpus

Subtitles play a crucial role in improving the accessibility of the vast amount of audiovisual content available on the Internet, allowing audiences worldwide to comprehend and engage with this content in various languages.Automatic subtitling (AS) systems are essential for alleviating the substantial workload of human transcribers and translators.However, existing AS corpora and the primary metric SubER focus on European languages.This paper introduces A-TASC, an Asian TED-based automatic subtitling corpus derived from English TED Talks, comprising nearly 800 hours of audio segments, aligned English transcripts, and subtitles in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.We then present SacreSubER, a modification of SubER, to enable the reliable evaluation of subtitle quality for languages without explicit word boundaries.Experimental results, using both end-to-end systems and pipeline approaches built on strong ASR and LLM components, validate the quality of the proposed corpus and reveal differences in AS performance between European and Asian languages.The code to build our corpus is released.