Papers › Perceptual and Task-Oriented Assessment of a Semantic Metric for ASR Evaluation
Perceptual and Task-Oriented Assessment of a Semantic Metric for ASR Evaluation
Janine Rugayan, Giampiero Salvi, Torbjørn Svendsen
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have become a vital part of our everyday lives through their many applications. However, as much as we have developed in this regard, our most common evaluation method for ASR systems still remains to be word error rate (WER). WER does not give information on the severity of errors, which strongly impacts practical performance. As such, we examine a semantic-based metric called Aligned Semantic Distance (ASD) against WER and demonstrate its advantage over WER in two facets. First, we conduct a survey asking participants to score reference text and ASR transcription pairs. We perform a correlation analysis and show that ASD is more correlated to the human evaluation scores compared to WER. We also explore the feasibility of predicting human perception using ASD. Second, we demonstrate that ASD is more effective than WER as an indicator of performance on downstream NLP tasks such as named entity recognition and sentiment classification.
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