The Hidden Cost of Digits: Number Normalization and WER in ASR Systems
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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arXiv:2609.36920v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Comprehensive evaluations of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Iberian languages remain limited, and low-resource languages, biases, and efficienc...
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.
arXiv:2605. 20712v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automatic speech recognition replaces typing only when correction costs less than manual entry - a threshold determined by error types, not counts: fixing a misrecognized domain term costs far more than inserting a comma.
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...
Dual-Form ASR (DF-ASR) is a framework that unifies spoken-form ASR and semantics-aware written-form inverse text normalization (ITN) for Chinese speech recognition. It uses paired spoken- and written-form supervision generated and judged by a large language model, and introduces an ITN-MWER objective to penalize errors on normalization-sensitive spans. DF-ASR also employs a REQUIRE-ITN/FORBID-ITN protocol to separately evaluate required normalization and forbidden-span preservation, achieving superior performance over open-source ASR-ITN systems while maintaining prompt-level control between transcript forms.
arXiv:2609.09554v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce BuzzASR, a collection of language-specialized fine-tuned Whisper models adapted for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in 102 languages. L...