---
license: cc-by-4.0
language:
- sk
task_categories:
- automatic-speech-recognition
pretty_name: "TrePal: Slovak parliament speech 2024–2026"
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
tags:
- speech
- slovak
- parliament
- asr
configs:
- config_name: default
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: data/train-*
  - split: validation
    path: data/validation-*
  - split: test
    path: data/test-*
---

# TrePal

**T**alking **Re**presentatives: Elected **P**arliament, **A**ligned & **L**abelled.

*The sequel to [SloPal](https://huggingface.co/datasets/NaiveNeuron/SloPalSpeech): first they drank, now they talk.*

TrePal has **471.5 hours of Slovak speech from the plenary sessions of the National Council of the Slovak Republic (NR SR)**,
from November 2024 to September 2026. That is the period right after SloPal ends.
- 140,420 clips of 1.5–25.4 s.
- Each clip is aligned to the official, human-checked stenographic record.
- Each clip comes with its speaker, MP ID, parliamentary club and session.

Released by [Streams s.r.o.](https://huggingface.co/streams-sro), the makers of [Gaston](https://www.gaston.live).

## Quick start

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("streams-sro/trepal", split="test")
print(ds[0]["text"], ds[0]["speaker"], ds[0]["club"])
ds[0]["audio"]  # 16 kHz mono
```

## At a glance

| Split | Recordings | Clips | Hours | Speakers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| train | 193 | 136,708 | 458.8 | 190 |
| validation | 2 | 1,771 | 5.93 | 63 |
| test | 2 | 1,941 | 6.77 | 73 |
| **total** | 197 | 140,420 | 471.5 | 190 |

- Audio is FLAC, 16 kHz mono. Clips are 1.5–25.4 s (mean ≈ 12 s), cut at word boundaries found by forced alignment.
- **The splits are by whole recordings** (one sitting = one recording). Test and validation are each 2 recordings, and nothing in them is in train.
  - The same MPs speak in every split, so the test measures new speeches by familiar speakers, not unseen speakers.
- Sessions 23–61 of the 9th electoral term, 2024-11-26 → 2026-09-17.
  - Sessions 55–60 are missing: their records weren't human-checked yet when we collected the data.
  - We may add them in a later version.

## Fields

| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| `id` | `<recording>_<speech item>_<segment>` |
| `audio` | FLAC 16 kHz mono |
| `text` | The training text: the official record's words, with single-meaning abbreviations written out as spoken ("napr." → "napríklad", "resp." → "respektíve", "č." → "číslo"). Numbers stay as the record writes them. |
| `text_record` | The same words exactly as in the official record. They differ from `text` in 1.8 % of clips. |
| `duration`, `start`, `end` | Seconds; `start` / `end` are positions in the full sitting recording |
| `recording` | The sitting recording the clip comes from (date and time of the NR SR video) |
| `session`, `date` | Session number and ISO date |
| `speech_type` | The NR SR item type, e.g. "Vystúpenie v rozprave" (debate speech), "Vystúpenie s faktickou poznámkou" (short reply), "Vstup predsedajúceho" (chair) |
| `speaker` | Speaker name as in the record |
| `poslanec_id` | The MP's ID on nrsr.sk. Empty for non-MPs (ministers, guests). |
| `club`, `party_list`, `region` | The MP's parliamentary club, election list and region, from the nrsr.sk profile **as of October 2026**. MPs who changed club show their current one. |

We publish only metadata about the public role. Birth dates, residence and nationality are left out on purpose.

## How it was made

1. **Source.** Audio of all plenary sittings from the NR SR media portal (tv.nrsr.sk), 319 recordings, 1,203 h.
   Transcripts per speech came from the same portal. **Only speeches marked "Skontrolovaný text" (checked text) are used.**
   Speeches still carrying the portal's unchecked AI transcript (22 h after alignment) were dropped.
2. **Alignment.** The portal's speech timestamps sit on a 15-minute grid, so they can't be used. We align each whole sitting as one word stream:
   - anchors are word 3-grams that are unique both in the record and in the greedy transcript of [MMS-1b-all](https://huggingface.co/facebook/mms-1b-all), kept in order (longest increasing subsequence);
   - CTC forced alignment runs between the anchors, with free "star" tokens at speaker changes and at stage notes.
   - This handles hour-long recesses and the chair's repeated formulas, which break a simple left-to-right aligner.
3. **Clips.** Speech is cut into clips of up to ~25 s at word boundaries. A clip never starts or ends on a number.
   - Dropped: clips shorter than 1.5 s, clips with a low mean alignment score, and clips with a speech rate outside 6–25 characters per second.
   - Chair lines and vote results ("143 prítomných, 76 za…") are typed into the record but never spoken, so they fall out on their own.
4. **Text.**
   - Bracketed stage notes ("(Potlesk.)", "(Prestávka.)") and inline speaker labels are removed.
   - Abbreviations with a single spoken form are expanded.
   - Clips with case-dependent abbreviations ("§", "ods.", "Z. z.", "mil.", "tzv."…) are left out, because their spoken form can't be recovered without guessing.
   - Unicode is NFC-normalized.
5. **Independent check.** An independent ASR model (kinit/whisper-large-v3-sk) transcribed all kept clips and wasn't used for selection. CER between our text and its transcript: median 0.3 %, 90 % of clips ≤ 7.2 %. A manual look at the outliers found mostly that model's own errors.

Of the 1,203 h of sitting audio, 485.7 h became aligned clips from checked speeches. The text rules in step 4 leave 471.5 h.

## Who speaks

Hours by parliamentary club (club as of October 2026, all splits):

| Club | Hours | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Klub Progresívne Slovensko | 144.5 | 31 % |
| Klub SLOVENSKO - ZA ĽUDÍ | 89.2 | 19 % |
| Klub Sloboda a Solidarita | 80.3 | 17 % |
| (no club / not an MP) | 66.1 | 14 % |
| Klub KDH | 34.7 | 7 % |
| Klub SMER - sociálna demokracia | 25.8 | 5 % |
| Klub HLAS - sociálna demokracia | 23.9 | 5 % |
| Klub Slovenská národná strana | 7.0 | 1 % |

Three quarters of the speaking time comes from the opposition clubs (PS, SLOVENSKO, SaS, KDH) and about a tenth from the governing parties' clubs (SMER, HLAS, SNS).
- The "no club" row is mostly government ministers, plus MPs who belong to no club.
- The table shows how the floor time was used in 2024–26, not how big the clubs are.
- **If you need balance across speakers or parties, sample by `speaker` or `club`.**

## Benchmark

WER in %, lower is better, on the full TrePal test split (1,941 clips, 6.77 h).
- Decoding: CTranslate2 fp16, beam 5, language sk, no prompt.
- Text normalization: lowercase, punctuation removed, numbers converted to digits on both sides.

| Model | WER | CER |
|---|---|---|
| openai/whisper-large-v3 | 8.42 | 3.01 |
| kinit/whisper-large-v3-sk | 2.41 | 1.29 |
| Gaston Slovak model (gaston-sk-v2)¹ | **1.47** | **0.62** |

¹ Available through [Gaston](https://www.gaston.live/en/languages/slovak) and its API; the weights aren't public. It was trained on the TrePal train split (among other data) and has never seen the test recordings.

## Limitations

- **The record isn't verbatim.** The stenographers smooth the speech: they drop fillers, false starts and repetitions, and lightly correct grammar.
  - So the text is clean written Slovak of what was said, not a phonetic transcript.
  - Some clips contain words the record leaves out. The aligner absorbs short ones.
- **Formal register only.** These are parliamentary speeches, read or semi-spontaneous, by about 190 speakers. Don't expect it to cover casual or regional speech.
- **Speaker labels follow the record.** Interjections from the floor are usually not transcribed, and the audio of a clip may contain them.
- Seven source recordings are truncated at the source. Speeches past the cut-off are simply missing.
- `club` / `party_list` describe the MP in October 2026, not on the day of the speech.

## License and attribution

**CC BY 4.0.** The audio and transcripts come from the National Council of the Slovak Republic (Národná rada Slovenskej republiky, [nrsr.sk](https://www.nrsr.sk), [tv.nrsr.sk](https://tv.nrsr.sk)).
- The segmentation, alignment, cleaning and metadata are by Streams s.r.o.
- If you use TrePal, please credit both the NR SR and this dataset.

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{trepal2026,
  title        = {TrePal: Slovak Parliament Speech 2024--2026, Aligned and Labelled},
  author       = {{Streams s.r.o.}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/streams-sro/trepal}}
}
```

Thanks to the authors of SloPal (NaiveNeuron) for showing the way, and to the NR SR for publishing its sittings and records openly.