2025/02/24 by Golshid Shekoufandeh, Paul Boersma, Shekoufandeh, Golshid +3 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.17284
openalex publication_date 2025/02/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We test and study the variation in speech recognition of fine-tuned versions of the Whisper model on child, elderly and non-native Dutch speech from the JASMIN-CGN corpus. Our primary goal is to evaluate how speakers' age and linguistic background influence Whisper's performance. Whisper achieves varying Word Error Rates (WER) when fine-tuned on subpopulations of specific ages and linguistic backgrounds. Fine-tuned performance is remarkably better than zero-shot performance, achieving a relative reduction in WER of 81% for native children, 72% for non-native children, 67% for non-native adults, and 65% for native elderly people. Our findings underscore the importance of training speech recognition models like Whisper on underrepresented subpopulations such as children, the elderly, and non-native speakers.