Does Whisper understand Swiss German? An automatic, qualitative, and human evaluation

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Main Authors: Dolev, Eyal Liron, Lutz, Clemens Fidel, Aepli, Noëmi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Dolev, Eyal Liron
Lutz, Clemens Fidel
Aepli, Noëmi
author_facet Dolev, Eyal Liron
Lutz, Clemens Fidel
Aepli, Noëmi
contents Whisper is a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) model (Radford et al., 2022). Although Swiss German dialects are allegedly not part of Whisper's training data, preliminary experiments showed that Whisper can transcribe Swiss German quite well, with the output being a speech translation into Standard German. To gain a better understanding of Whisper's performance on Swiss German, we systematically evaluate it using automatic, qualitative, and human evaluation. We test its performance on three existing test sets: SwissDial (Dogan-Schönberger et al., 2021), STT4SG-350 (Plüss et al., 2023), and Swiss Parliaments Corpus (Plüss et al., 2021). In addition, we create a new test set for this work, based on short mock clinical interviews. For automatic evaluation, we used word error rate (WER) and BLEU. In the qualitative analysis, we discuss Whisper's strengths and weaknesses and anylyze some output examples. For the human evaluation, we conducted a survey with 28 participants who were asked to evaluate Whisper's performance. All of our evaluations suggest that Whisper is a viable ASR system for Swiss German, so long as the Standard German output is desired.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_19310
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Does Whisper understand Swiss German? An automatic, qualitative, and human evaluation
Dolev, Eyal Liron
Lutz, Clemens Fidel
Aepli, Noëmi
Computation and Language
Whisper is a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) model (Radford et al., 2022). Although Swiss German dialects are allegedly not part of Whisper's training data, preliminary experiments showed that Whisper can transcribe Swiss German quite well, with the output being a speech translation into Standard German. To gain a better understanding of Whisper's performance on Swiss German, we systematically evaluate it using automatic, qualitative, and human evaluation. We test its performance on three existing test sets: SwissDial (Dogan-Schönberger et al., 2021), STT4SG-350 (Plüss et al., 2023), and Swiss Parliaments Corpus (Plüss et al., 2021). In addition, we create a new test set for this work, based on short mock clinical interviews. For automatic evaluation, we used word error rate (WER) and BLEU. In the qualitative analysis, we discuss Whisper's strengths and weaknesses and anylyze some output examples. For the human evaluation, we conducted a survey with 28 participants who were asked to evaluate Whisper's performance. All of our evaluations suggest that Whisper is a viable ASR system for Swiss German, so long as the Standard German output is desired.
title Does Whisper understand Swiss German? An automatic, qualitative, and human evaluation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19310