Sirin Aoulad si Ahmed


2025

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Out of the Box, into the Clinic? Evaluating State-of-the-Art ASR for Clinical Applications for Older Adults
Bram Van Dijk | Tiberon Kuiper | Sirin Aoulad si Ahmed | Armel Lefebvre | Jake Johnson | Jan Duin | Simon Mooijaart | Marco Spruit
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing (HCI+NLP)

Voice-controlled interfaces can support older adults in clinical contexts – with chatbots being a prime example – but reliable Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for underrepresented groups remains a bottleneck. This study evaluates state-of-the-art ASR models on language use of older Dutch adults, who interacted with the Welzijn.AI chatbot designed for geriatric contexts. We benchmark generic multilingual ASR models, and models fine-tuned for Dutch spoken by older adults, while also considering processing speed. Our results show that generic multilingual models outperform fine-tuned models, which suggests recent ASR models can generalise well out of the box to real-world datasets. Moreover, our results indicate that truncating generic models is helpful in balancing the accuracy-speed trade-off. Nonetheless, we also find inputs which cause a high word error rate and place them in context.