{"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/word-error-rate-estimation-for-speech","title":"Word Error Rate Estimation for Speech Recognition: e-WER","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2018-07-01","proceeding":"ACL 2018 7","authors":["Ahmed Ali","Steve Renals"],"abstract":"Measuring the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems requires manually transcribed data in order to compute the word error rate (WER), which is often time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to estimate WER, or e-WER, which does not require a gold-standard transcription of the test set. Our e-WER framework uses a comprehensive set of features: ASR recognised text, character recognition results to complement recognition output, and internal decoder features. We report results for the two features; black-box and glass-box using unseen 24 Arabic broadcast programs. Our system achieves 16.9{\\%} WER root mean squared error (RMSE) across 1,400 sentences. The estimated overall WER e-WER was 25.3{\\%} for the three hours test set, while the actual WER was 28.5{\\%}.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/P18-2004","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/P18-2004.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":"word-error-rate-estimation-for-speech","repo_url":"https://github.com/qcri/e-wer","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":"automatic-speech-recognition","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)"},{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition","task_name":"Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"word-embeddings","task_name":"Word Embeddings"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition-1","task_name":"speech-recognition"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}