# The Interspeech 2025 Speech Accessibility Project Challenge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22047 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22047/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [ContextNet: Improving Convolutional Neural Networks for Automatic Speech Recognition with Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03191/) (2020)
- [EvalAI: Towards Better Evaluation Systems for AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03570/) (2019)
- [NeMo Inverse Text Normalization: From Development To Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05055/) (2021)
- [MENLI: Robust Evaluation Metrics from Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07316/) (2022)
- [Aligning ASR Evaluation with Human and LLM Judgments: Intelligibility Metrics Using Phonetic, Semantic, and NLI Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16528/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Training-Free Cross-Lingual Dysarthria Severity Assessment via Phonological Subspace Analysis in Self-Supervised Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10123/) (2026)
- [Confidence-Guided Error Correction for Disordered Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25048/) (2025)
- [MetaSICL: Globalizing Auditory LLMs for Underserved Speakers and Languages via Meta Speech In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18904/) (2026)
- [FiLM-Based Speaker Conditioning of a SpeechLLM for Pathological Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06211/) (2026)
- [Transcript-Free Flow-Matching Text-to-Speech via Speech Feature Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20266/) (2026)
- [Huntington Disease Automatic Speech Recognition with Biomarker Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11168/) (2026)
- [Phonological Subspace Collapse Is Aetiology-Specific and Cross-Lingually Stable: Evidence from 3,374 Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21706/) (2026)
- [Augmenting Dysarthric Speech Severity Assessment with MOS Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18645/) (2026)
- [S-DiverSe: Spanish Diverse Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03207/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While the last decade has witnessed significant advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, performance of these systems for individuals with speech disabilities remains inadequate, partly due to limited public training data. To bridge this gap, the 2025 Interspeech Speech Accessibility Project (SAP) Challenge was launched, utilizing over 400 hours of SAP data collected and transcribed from more than 500 individuals with diverse speech disabilities. Hosted on EvalAI and leveraging the remote evaluation pipeline, the SAP Challenge evaluates submissions based on Word Error Rate and Semantic Score. Consequently, 12 out of 22 valid teams outperformed the whisper-large-v2 baseline in terms of WER, while 17 teams surpassed the baseline on SemScore. Notably, the top team achieved the lowest WER of 8.11%, and the highest SemScore of 88.44% at the same time, setting new benchmarks for future ASR systems in recognizing impaired speech.