# Is Semi-Automatic Transcription Useful in Corpus Creation? Preliminary Considerations on the KIParla Corpus

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16258 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16258/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Disfluencies and Human Speech Transcription Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04398/) (2019)
- [The timing bottleneck: Why timing and overlap are mission-critical for conversational user interfaces, speech recognition and dialogue systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15493/) (2023)
- [You don't understand me!: Comparing ASR results for L1 and L2 speakers of Swedish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13379/) (2024)
- [Investigating the Representation of Backchannels and Fillers in Fine-tuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20237/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper analyses the implementation of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) into the transcription workflow of the KIParla corpus, a resource of spoken Italian. Through a two-phase experiment, 11 expert and novice transcribers produced both manual and ASR-assisted transcriptions of identical audio segments across three different types of conversation, which were subsequently analyzed through a combination of statistical modeling, word-level alignment and a series of annotation-based metrics. Results show that ASR-assisted workflows can increase transcription speed but do not consistently improve overall accuracy, with effects depending on multiple factors such as workflow configuration, conversation type and annotator experience. Analyses combining alignment-based metrics, descriptive statistics and statistical modeling provide a systematic framework to monitor transcription behavior across annotators and workflows. Despite limitations, ASR-assisted transcription, potentially supported by task-specific fine-tuning, could be integrated into the KIParla transcription workflow to accelerate corpus creation without compromising transcription quality.