SpeechColab Leaderboard: An Open-Source Platform for Automatic Speech Recognition Evaluation

In the wake of the surging tide of deep learning over the past decade, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has garnered substantial attention, leading to the emergence of numerous publicly accessible ASR systems that are actively being integrated into our daily lives. Nonetheless, the impartial and replicable evaluation of these ASR systems encounters challenges due to various crucial subtleties. In this paper we introduce the SpeechColab Leaderboard, a general-purpose, open-source platform designed for ASR evaluation. With this platform: (i) We report a comprehensive benchmark, unveiling the current state-of-the-art panorama for ASR systems, covering both open-source models and industrial commercial services. (ii) We quantize how distinct nuances in the scoring pipeline influence the final benchmark outcomes. These include nuances related to capitalization, punctuation, interjection, contraction, synonym usage, compound words, etc. These issues have gained prominence in the context of the transition towards an End-to-End future. (iii) We propose a practical modification to the conventional Token-Error-Rate (TER) evaluation metric, with inspirations from Kolmogorov complexity and Normalized Information Distance (NID). This adaptation, called modified-TER (mTER), achieves proper normalization and symmetrical treatment of reference and hypothesis. By leveraging this platform as a large-scale testing ground, this study demonstrates the robustness and backward compatibility of mTER when compared to TER. The SpeechColab Leaderboard is accessible at https://github.com/SpeechColab/Leaderboard