Aligning ASR Evaluation with Human and LLM Judgments: Intelligibility Metrics Using Phonetic, Semantic, and NLI Approaches

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Main Authors: Phukon, Bornali, Zheng, Xiuwen, Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Phukon, Bornali
Zheng, Xiuwen
Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark
author_facet Phukon, Bornali
Zheng, Xiuwen
Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark
contents Traditional ASR metrics like WER and CER fail to capture intelligibility, especially for dysarthric and dysphonic speech, where semantic alignment matters more than exact word matches. ASR systems struggle with these speech types, often producing errors like phoneme repetitions and imprecise consonants, yet the meaning remains clear to human listeners. We identify two key challenges: (1) Existing metrics do not adequately reflect intelligibility, and (2) while LLMs can refine ASR output, their effectiveness in correcting ASR transcripts of dysarthric speech remains underexplored. To address this, we propose a novel metric integrating Natural Language Inference (NLI) scores, semantic similarity, and phonetic similarity. Our ASR evaluation metric achieves a 0.890 correlation with human judgments on Speech Accessibility Project data, surpassing traditional methods and emphasizing the need to prioritize intelligibility over error-based measures.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_16528
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Aligning ASR Evaluation with Human and LLM Judgments: Intelligibility Metrics Using Phonetic, Semantic, and NLI Approaches
Phukon, Bornali
Zheng, Xiuwen
Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark
Machine Learning
Traditional ASR metrics like WER and CER fail to capture intelligibility, especially for dysarthric and dysphonic speech, where semantic alignment matters more than exact word matches. ASR systems struggle with these speech types, often producing errors like phoneme repetitions and imprecise consonants, yet the meaning remains clear to human listeners. We identify two key challenges: (1) Existing metrics do not adequately reflect intelligibility, and (2) while LLMs can refine ASR output, their effectiveness in correcting ASR transcripts of dysarthric speech remains underexplored. To address this, we propose a novel metric integrating Natural Language Inference (NLI) scores, semantic similarity, and phonetic similarity. Our ASR evaluation metric achieves a 0.890 correlation with human judgments on Speech Accessibility Project data, surpassing traditional methods and emphasizing the need to prioritize intelligibility over error-based measures.
title Aligning ASR Evaluation with Human and LLM Judgments: Intelligibility Metrics Using Phonetic, Semantic, and NLI Approaches
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16528