Cited by 290Speech Recognition and SynthesisSpeech and Audio ProcessingSpeech and dialogue systems

From WER and RIL to MER and WIL: improved evaluation measures for connected speech recognition

Morris, Andrew Cameron, Maier, Viktoria, Green, Phil·2004·Interspeech 2004

Abstract

The word error rate (WER), commonly used in ASR assessment, measures the cost of restoring the output word sequence to the original input sequence. However, for most CSR applications apart from dictation machines a more meaningful performance measure would be given by the proportion of information communicated. In this article we introduce two new absolute CSR performance measures: MER (match error rate) and WIL (word information lost). MER is the proportion of I/O word matches which are errors. WIL is a simple approximation to the proportion of word information lost which overcomes the problems associated with the RIL (relative information lost) measure that was proposed half a century ago. Issues relating to ideal performance measurement are discussed and the commonly used Viterbi input/output alignment procedure, with zero weight for hits and equal weight for substitutions, deletions and insertions, is shown to be optimal.

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Crossref · 10.21437/interspeech.2004-668

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  • The final Language Model combination of generic LM (10% weight) and specialized LM (90% weight) has been shown to lead to low Word Error Rate for domain specific applications.

    “This weighting has been shown to lead to low Word Error Rate (WER) 3 (Morris et al., 2004) for domain specific applications (Lecouteux et al., 2011).”
  • Additional measures like CER, MER, or WWER have the same underlying problem as WER, as they also quantify the editing distance between two texts.

    “Additional measures like the Character Error Rate (CER), the Match Error Rate (MER) [Morris et al. 2004] or the Weighted Word Error Rate (WWER) [Apone et al. 2010] have the same underlying problem, as they also quantify the editing distance between two texts.”

    From Measuring the Accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition Solutions (2023) · cites this paper as Morris et al. 2004

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Authors
Morris, A. C., Maier, V., & Green, P.
Venue
Interspeech 2004
Publisher
ISCA
Published
2004-10-04
Pages
2765-2768
ISSN
2308-457X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W38194800
Cited by
290
References
6
Citations by year
2026: 39 · 2025: 58 · 2024: 37 · 2023: 44 · 2022: 31 · 2021: 28 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 7 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 2
FWCI
0.86
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Interspeech (USB) (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Signal Processing › Speech and Audio Processing
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
Keywords
connected speech recognition, performance indicators, word error rate, Viterbi alignment, information loss

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