  Direct speech-to-text translation (ST) models are usually trained on corpora
segmented at sentence level, but at inference time they are commonly fed with
audio split by a voice activity detector (VAD). Since VAD segmentation is not
syntax-informed, the resulting segments do not necessarily correspond to
well-formed sentences uttered by the speaker but, most likely, to fragments of
one or more sentences. This segmentation mismatch degrades considerably the
quality of ST models' output. So far, researchers have focused on improving
audio segmentation towards producing sentence-like splits. In this paper,
instead, we address the issue in the model, making it more robust to a
different, potentially sub-optimal segmentation. To this aim, we train our
models on randomly segmented data and compare two approaches: fine-tuning and
adding the previous segment as context. We show that our context-aware solution
is more robust to VAD-segmented input, outperforming a strong base model and
the fine-tuning on different VAD segmentations of an English-German test set by
up to 4.25 BLEU points.
