James Flynn


2021

pdf
How Might We Create Better Benchmarks for Speech Recognition?
Alëna Aksënova | Daan van Esch | James Flynn | Pavel Golik
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Benchmarking: Past, Present and Future

The applications of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are proliferating, in part due to recent significant quality improvements. However, as recent work indicates, even state-of-the-art speech recognition systems – some which deliver impressive benchmark results, struggle to generalize across use cases. We review relevant work, and, hoping to inform future benchmark development, outline a taxonomy of speech recognition use cases, proposed for the next generation of ASR benchmarks. We also survey work on metrics, in addition to the de facto standard Word Error Rate (WER) metric, and we introduce a versatile framework designed to describe interactions between linguistic variation and ASR performance metrics.