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The paper introduces SITAR, a situational distortion metric for evaluating automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. SITAR aggregates situational severity and cumulative extent into a unified score using a bounded recursive formulation, and is implemented as a lightweight BERT-family regressor that requires minimal runtime cost. The authors validate SITAR through extrinsic and intrinsic protocols, showing it tracks capability scaling and provides diagnostic utility across diverse datasets and models.
arXiv:2609.13602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Voice agents often need to collect names, addresses, identifiers, dates, and times exactly, yet end-to-end benchmarks obscure where capture fails. We i...
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.
The paper introduces a token‑level extension of Omni‑Temporal Classification (OTC) for automatic speech recognition, allowing unsupported tokens to be bypassed while preserving supervision for the rest of the word. Across 19 languages and three corpora, this token‑level OTC consistently outperforms standard CTC, achieving the lowest mean word error rate on every dataset and a 9.45% average relative WER reduction. A predictive‑entropy‑indexed schedule replaces epoch‑based relaxation, reducing training‑length dependence while maintaining performance.
The paper introduces a cause-aware error recovery framework for cascaded Automatic Speech Recognition – Large Language Model (ASR‑LLM) pipelines in Spoken Dialogue Systems. It replaces simple ASR confidence filtering with precision‑focused detectors that use deep ASR latent representations to classify token‑level errors into perception, comprehension, and deletion failures. This fine‑grained diagnosis enables the LLM to execute targeted, multi‑turn clarification strategies, leading to a more than two‑fold increase in recall on domain‑shift errors and significant reductions in word error rate and downstream task errors across varied accents, distortions, and domains.
arXiv:2606. 19595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice agents deployed in structured workflows (customer service, healthcare scheduling, account management) must handle frequent user interruptions while maintaining progress through multi-step procedures.