arXiv Machine Learning

Beyond WER: Entity and Disfluency Recall in Accented Conversational ASR

The paper introduces a three‑stage pipeline to improve accented conversational ASR for speakers from India, Indonesia, and Latin America. It uses heuristic SQL filters to curate entity‑rich training data, regional LoRA adapters fine‑tuned on Qwen2.5‑Omni‑3B to generate both verbatim and corrected transcripts, and a six‑category error taxonomy validated by an LLM judge. The approach raises entity recall to 80‑85% and filler recall to 76‑86%, while keeping WER low (6‑10%) and outperforming Whisper and a commercial ASR on entity recall.

arXiv AI
Jun 9

Subtitle-Aligned Fine-Tuning of Whisper for Swiss German ASR: Benchmark Contamination, Convention Mismatch, and an Honest Baseline at 25.6% WER (13.8% cWER)

arXiv:2606. 07608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a systematic study of fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper large-v3 for Swiss German ASR, using 1,367 hours of broadcast speech paired with Standard German subtitles as weak supervision.

By Felix Akeret
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Scaling phoneme-based TTS augmentation for ASR: A unified pipeline and controlled study

The paper introduces a unified phoneme‑based TTS‑to‑ASR augmentation pipeline that uses a multilingual TTS model with language‑ID conditioning and incorporates grapheme‑to‑phoneme conversion, reference‑speech filtering, and candidate‑text selection. It proposes phoneme‑frequency‑guided selection (PFGS) to rank sentences based on phoneme frequencies from real ASR labels, and demonstrates that random augmentation and PFGS both improve ASR performance across Arabic, French, Italian, and Portuguese test sets, with PFGS yielding up to a 19.3% relative WER reduction. The study also shows that filtering reference speech can further lower WER by up to 0.59 points on certain datasets.

By Zhen Wang, TianRui Wu, RongQi Han, Hao Wu, Wei Liang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Beyond Prompting: Efficient and Robust Contextual Biasing for Speech LLMs via Logit-Space Integration (LOGIC)

The paper introduces LOGIC (Logit‑Space Integration for Contextual Biasing), a new framework that injects contextual entity information directly into the decoding layer of Speech Large Language Models, bypassing the limitations of prompt‑based methods. LOGIC operates with constant‑time complexity regardless of the size of the entity list, and experiments with the Phi‑4‑MM model across 11 multilingual locales show an average 9% relative reduction in Entity WER while adding only a 0.30% increase in False Alarm Rate.

By Peidong Wang, Jian Xue, Jinyu Li
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Building a Production Greek-English Speech Recognizer

The paper details a multi‑month engineering effort to build Sophea, a production Greek‑English automatic speech recognition system. It evaluates the system against nine production gates—including word error rate, language identification, and hallucinations—across twenty‑three training iterations and two model architectures, finding that no single training‑data composition satisfies all gates. The authors describe a six‑stage data pipeline that dramatically reduces discarded Greek audio, isolate a hallucination defect to a specific training package, and demonstrate that a three‑model ROVER ensemble achieves full gate coverage and a 29 % relative WER improvement. A separate learned arbiter model is released on the Open ASR Leaderboard with 4.26 % average WER on English tests and 25.88 % on live Greek noisy traffic.

By Christos Petrocheilos, Cleopatra Papadopoulou, Chris Porikis, Ioakeim Perros, Ayoub Kirouane, Themistoklis Nikolis