Word error rate

Word error rate (WER) is a common metric of the performance of a speech recognition or machine translation system. Word error rate (WER) is a common metric of the performance of a speech recognition or machine translation system. The general difficulty of measuring performance lies in the fact that the recognized word sequence can have a different length from the reference word sequence (supposedly the correct one). The WER is derived from the Levenshtein distance, working at the word level instead of the phoneme level. The WER is a valuable tool for comparing different systems as well as for evaluating improvements within one system. This kind of measurement, however, provides no details on the nature of translation errors and further work is therefore required to identify the main source(s) of error and to focus any research effort. This problem is solved by first aligning the recognized word sequence with the reference (spoken) word sequence using dynamic string alignment. Examination of this issue is seen through a theory called the power law that states the correlation between perplexity and word error rate.