{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/pier-a-novel-metric-for-evaluating-what","title":"PIER: A Novel Metric for Evaluating What Matters in Code-Switching","arxiv_id":"2501.09512","date":"2025-01-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Enes Yavuz Ugan","Ngoc-Quan Pham","Leonard Bärmann","Alex Waibel"],"abstract":"Code-switching, the alternation of languages within a single discourse, presents a significant challenge for Automatic Speech Recognition. Despite the unique nature of the task, performance is commonly measured with established metrics such as Word-Error-Rate (WER). However, in this paper, we question whether these general metrics accurately assess performance on code-switching. Specifically, using both Connectionist-Temporal-Classification and Encoder-Decoder models, we show fine-tuning on non-code-switched data from both matrix and embedded language improves classical metrics on code-switching test sets, although actual code-switched words worsen (as expected). Therefore, we propose Point-of-Interest Error Rate (PIER), a variant of WER that focuses only on specific words of interest. We instantiate PIER on code-switched utterances and show that this more accurately describes the code-switching performance, showing huge room for improvement in future work. This focused evaluation allows for a more precise assessment of model performance, particularly in challenging aspects such as inter-word and intra-word code-switching.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09512v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09512v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"pier-a-novel-metric-for-evaluating-what","repo_url":"https://github.com/enesyugan/pier-codeswitching-evaluation","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"automatic-speech-recognition-2","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition","task_name":"Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition-1","task_name":"speech-recognition"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2501.09512","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2501.09512","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}