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Main Authors: Roux, Thibault Bañeras, Wottawa, Jane, Rouvier, Mickael, Merlin, Teva, Dufour, Richard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27542
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author Roux, Thibault Bañeras
Wottawa, Jane
Rouvier, Mickael
Merlin, Teva
Dufour, Richard
author_facet Roux, Thibault Bañeras
Wottawa, Jane
Rouvier, Mickael
Merlin, Teva
Dufour, Richard
contents Conventionally, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are evaluated on their ability to correctly recognize each word contained in a speech signal. In this context, the word error rate (WER) metric is the reference for evaluating speech transcripts. Several studies have shown that this measure is too limited to correctly evaluate an ASR system, which has led to the proposal of other variants of metrics (weighted WER, BERTscore, semantic distance, etc.). However, they remain system-oriented, even when transcripts are intended for humans. In this paper, we firstly present Human Assessed Transcription Side-by-side (HATS), an original French manually annotated data set in terms of human perception of transcription errors produced by various ASR systems. 143 humans were asked to choose the best automatic transcription out of two hypotheses. We investigated the relationship between human preferences and various ASR evaluation metrics, including lexical and embedding-based ones, the latter being those that correlate supposedly the most with human perception.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_27542
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HATS: An Open data set Integrating Human Perception Applied to the Evaluation of Automatic Speech Recognition Metrics
Roux, Thibault Bañeras
Wottawa, Jane
Rouvier, Mickael
Merlin, Teva
Dufour, Richard
Computation and Language
Conventionally, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are evaluated on their ability to correctly recognize each word contained in a speech signal. In this context, the word error rate (WER) metric is the reference for evaluating speech transcripts. Several studies have shown that this measure is too limited to correctly evaluate an ASR system, which has led to the proposal of other variants of metrics (weighted WER, BERTscore, semantic distance, etc.). However, they remain system-oriented, even when transcripts are intended for humans. In this paper, we firstly present Human Assessed Transcription Side-by-side (HATS), an original French manually annotated data set in terms of human perception of transcription errors produced by various ASR systems. 143 humans were asked to choose the best automatic transcription out of two hypotheses. We investigated the relationship between human preferences and various ASR evaluation metrics, including lexical and embedding-based ones, the latter being those that correlate supposedly the most with human perception.
title HATS: An Open data set Integrating Human Perception Applied to the Evaluation of Automatic Speech Recognition Metrics
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27542