# A Text-To-Text Alignment Algorithm for Better Evaluation of Modern Speech Recognition Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24478 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24478/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01743/) (2025)
- [TED-LIUM 3: twice as much data and corpus repartition for experiments on speaker adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04699/) (2018)
- [Fast Conformer with Linearly Scalable Attention for Efficient Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05084/) (2023)
- [Efficient Sequence Transduction by Jointly Predicting Tokens and Durations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06795/) (2023)
- [PriMock57: A Dataset Of Primary Care Mock Consultations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00333/) (2022)
- [Granite-speech: open-source speech-aware LLMs with strong English ASR capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08699/) (2025)
- [Phonetically-Oriented Word Error Alignment for Speech Recognition Error Analysis in Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11024/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Symphony for Speech-to-Text: Supporting Real-Time Medical Voice Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16545/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern neural networks have greatly improved performance across speech recognition benchmarks. However, gains are often driven by frequent words with limited semantic weight, which can obscure meaningful differences in word error rate, the primary evaluation metric. Errors in rare terms, named entities, and domain-specific vocabulary are more consequential, but remain hidden by aggregate metrics. This highlights the need for finer-grained error analysis, which depends on accurate alignment between reference and model transcripts. However, conventional alignment methods are not designed for such precision. We propose a novel alignment algorithm that couples dynamic programming with beam search scoring. Compared to traditional text alignment methods, our approach provides more accurate alignment of individual errors, enabling reliable error analysis. The algorithm is made available via PyPI.