The paper reports on fine‑tuning a transducer‑based speech recognizer for impaired speech, achieving a 7.81% character error rate on a hidden test set—well below the 15.26% baseline. The fine‑tuned model ran on CPUs with a median latency of ~0.9 s and performed best on speakers that were hardest for the off‑the‑shelf recognizer. The authors note that fine‑tuning yields larger gains on new speakers and on unseen sentences, and they discuss implications for evaluating such systems.
By Kien Nguyen, Tuan Dinh, Bao Phan
arXiv:2609.21663v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Word Error Rate (WER), the most commonly used metric for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), treats every lexical deviation from the reference as equal...
By Hritika Sharma, Thibault Ba\~neras-Roux, Alessandra Pinto, Petr Motlicek, Hyunggu Jung, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello, Somang Nam
arXiv:2610.20461v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Character Error Rate (CER), the standard metric for OCR and vision-language models (VLMs), charges a typo as much as a wrong name. We introduce semCER,...
By Nguyen Nguyen, Yongyi Zang
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
arXiv:2607. 08256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Best-of-$N$ (BoN) inference improves content consistency in zero-shot text-to-speech by selecting from $N$ candidates with an automatic speech recognition (ASR) verifier.
By Taehyung Yu, Seongjae Kang
FA-Bench is an open framework that standardizes forced alignment evaluation by fixing transcript normalization, data splits, phone mapping, and scoring procedures. It offers two tracks: one with reference transcripts and another with recognizer outputs, evaluated on clean and four degraded audio conditions using 21 open models and 9 commercial APIs. The benchmark scores every utterance boundary with a tolerance‑based F1 metric, revealing systematic timing biases such as Whisper’s 150 ms early alignment and commercial APIs’ 50 ms late alignment.
By Wei Chu, Yuanzhe Dong, Ke Tan, Dong Han, Yichao Zhou, Ruchao Fan, Bingshen Mu, Jingbei Li, Vishwas Shetty, Sarthak Bisht, Ziyue Qiu, Massa Baali, Rita Singh, Bhisha Raj