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C.M. Downey
@cmdowney.com

Congratulations to @feiyuehchen.bsky.social and Lateef Adeleke who successfully converted their term paper on feature-level ASR evaluation into a publication to appear at the AfricaNLP workshop at EACL next month! pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2602.04716

arxiv.orgLinguistically Informed Evaluation of Multilingual ASR for African LanguagesWord Error Rate (WER) mischaracterizes ASR models' performance for African languages by combining phonological, tone, and other linguistic errors into a single lexical error. By contrast, Feature Erro...

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C.M. Downey
@cmdowney.com

It features 1) The first ASR baseline for Uneme (endangered Edoid lg) 2) A Tone Error Rate (TER) extension to Feature Error Rate (FER), calculated by carefully scoring phonetic feature vectors 3) Evidence that WER misrepresents ASR performance by collapsing feature-level errors into lexical failure