2023/07/21 by Thilo von Neumann, von Neumann, Thilo, Christoph Boeddeker +5 · 14 citations
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Speech and dialogue systems #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2307.11394
openalex publication_date 2023/07/21 · openalex created_date 2023/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
MeetEval is an open-source toolkit to evaluate all kinds of meeting transcription systems. It provides a unified interface for the computation of commonly used Word Error Rates (WERs), specifically cpWER, ORC-WER and MIMO-WER along other WER definitions. We extend the cpWER computation by a temporal constraint to ensure that only words are identified as correct when the temporal alignment is plausible. This leads to a better quality of the matching of the hypothesis string to the reference string that more closely resembles the actual transcription quality, and a system is penalized if it provides poor time annotations. Since word-level timing information is often not available, we present a way to approximate exact word-level timings from segment-level timings (e.g., a sentence) and show that the approximation leads to a similar WER as a matching with exact word-level annotations. At the same time, the time constraint leads to a speedup of the matching algorithm, which outweighs the additional overhead caused by processing the time stamps.