wer_are_we

WER are we? An attempt at tracking states of the art(s) and recent results on speech recognition. Feel free to correct! (Inspired by Are we there yet?)

WER

LibriSpeech

(Possibly trained on more data than LibriSpeech.)

WER test-clean	WER test-other	Paper	Published	Notes
5.83%	12.69%	Humans Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin	December 2015	Humans
1.8%	2.9%	HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units	June 2021	CNN-Transformer + Transformer LM (Self-Supervised, Libri-light-60K Unlabeled Data)
1.9%	3.9%	Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition	May 2020	Convolution-augmented-Transformer(Conformer) + 3-layer LSTM LM (data augmentation:SpecAugment)
1.9%	4.1%	ContextNet: Improving Convolutional Neural Networks for Automatic Speech Recognition with Global Context	May 2020	CNN-RNN-Transducer(ContextNet) + 3-layer LSTM LM (data augmentation:SpecAugment)
2.0%	4.1%	End-to-end ASR: from Supervised to Semi-Supervised Learning with Modern Architectures	November 2019	Conv+Transformer AM (10k word pieces) with ConvLM decoding and Transformer rescoring + 60k hours unlabeled
2.1%	4.1%	Efficient Training of Neural Transducer for Speech Recognition	May 2022	Conformer Transducer (efficient 3-stage progressive training: 35 epochs in total) + Transformer LM
2.3%	4.9%	Transformer-based Acoustic Modeling for Hybrid Speech Recognition	October 2019	Transformer AM (chenones) + 4-gram LM + Neural LM rescore (data augmentation:Speed perturbation and SpecAugment)
2.3%	5.0%	RWTH ASR Systems for LibriSpeech: Hybrid vs Attention	September 2019, Interspeech	HMM-DNN + lattice-based sMBR + LSTM LM + Transformer LM rescoring (no data augmentation)
2.3%	5.2%	End-to-end ASR: from Supervised to Semi-Supervised Learning with Modern Architectures	November 2019	Conv+Transformer AM (10k word pieces) with ConvLM decoding and Transformer rescoring
2.2%	5.8%	State-of-the-Art Speech Recognition Using Multi-Stream Self-Attention With Dilated 1D Convolutions	October 2019	Multi-stream self-attention in hybrid ASR + 4-gram LM + Neural LM rescore (no data augmentation)
2.5%	5.8%	SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition	April 2019	Listen Attend Spell
3.2%	7.6%	From Senones to Chenones: Tied Context-Dependent Graphemes for Hybrid Speech Recognition	October 2019	LC-BLSTM AM (chenones) + 4-gram LM (data augmentation:Speed perturbation and SpecAugment)
3.19%	7.64%	The CAPIO 2017 Conversational Speech Recognition System	April 2018	TDNN + TDNN-LSTM + CNN-bLSTM + Dense TDNN-LSTM across two kinds of trees + N-gram LM + Neural LM rescore
2.44%	8.29%	Improved Vocal Tract Length Perturbation for a State-of-the-Art End-to-End Speech Recognition System	September 2019, Interspeech	encoder-attention-decoder + Transformer LM
3.80%	8.76%	Semi-Orthogonal Low-Rank Matrix Factorization for Deep Neural Networks	Interspeech, Sept 2018	Kaldi recipe, 17-layer TDNN-F + iVectors
2.8%	9.3%	RWTH ASR Systems for LibriSpeech: Hybrid vs Attention	September 2019, Interspeech	encoder-attention-decoder + BPE + Transformer LM (no data augmentation)
3.26%	10.47%	Fully Convolutional Speech Recognition	December 2018	End-to-end CNN on the waveform + conv LM
3.82%	12.76%	Improved training of end-to-end attention models for speech recognition	Interspeech, Sept 2018	encoder-attention-decoder end-to-end model
4.28%		Purely sequence-trained neural networks for ASR based on lattice-free MMI	September 2016	HMM-TDNN trained with MMI + data augmentation (speed) + iVectors + 3 regularizations
4.83%		A time delay neural network architecture for efficient modeling of long temporal contexts	2015	HMM-TDNN + iVectors
5.15%	12.73%	Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin	December 2015	9-layer model w/ 2 layers of 2D-invariant convolution & 7 recurrent layers, w/ 100M parameters trained on 11940h
5.51%	13.97%	LibriSpeech: an ASR Corpus Based on Public Domain Audio Books	2015	HMM-DNN + pNorm*
4.8%	14.5%	Letter-Based Speech Recognition with Gated ConvNets	December 2017	(Gated) ConvNet for AM going to letters + 4-gram LM
8.01%	22.49%	same, Kaldi	2015	HMM-(SAT)GMM
	12.51%	Audio Augmentation for Speech Recognition	2015	TDNN + pNorm + speed up/down speech

WSJ

(Possibly trained on more data than WSJ.)

WER eval'92	WER eval'93	Paper	Published	Notes
5.03%	8.08%	Humans Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin	December 2015	Humans
2.9%		End-to-end Speech Recognition Using Lattice-Free MMI	September 2018	HMM-DNN LF-MMI trained (biphone)
3.10%		Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin	December 2015	9-layer model w/ 2 layers of 2D-invariant convolution & 7 recurrent layers, w/ 100M parameters
3.47%		Deep Recurrent Neural Networks for Acoustic Modelling	April 2015	TC-DNN-BLSTM-DNN
3.5%	6.8%	Fully Convolutional Speech Recognition	December 2018	End-to-end CNN on the waveform + conv LM
3.63%	5.66%	LibriSpeech: an ASR Corpus Based on Public Domain Audio Books	2015	test-set on open vocabulary (i.e. harder), model = HMM-DNN + pNorm*
4.1%		End-to-end Speech Recognition Using Lattice-Free MMI	September 2018	HMM-DNN E2E LF-MMI trained (word n-gram)
5.6%		Convolutional Neural Networks-based Continuous Speech Recognition using Raw Speech Signal	2014	CNN over RAW speech (wav)
5.7%	8.7%	End-to-end Speech Recognition from the Raw Waveform	June 2018	End-to-end CNN on the waveform

Hub5'00 Evaluation (Switchboard / CallHome)

(Possibly trained on more data than SWB, but test set = full Hub5'00.)

WER (SWB)	WER (CH)	Paper	Published	Notes
4.9%	9.5%	An investigation of phone-based subword units for end-to-end speech recognition	April 2020	2 CNN + 24 layers Transformer encoder and 12 layers Transformer decoder model with char BPE and phoneme BPE units.
5.0%	9.1%	The CAPIO 2017 Conversational Speech Recognition System	December 2017	2 Dense LSTMs + 3 CNN-bLSTMs across 3 phonesets from previous Capio paper & AM adaptation using parameter averaging (5.6% SWB / 10.5% CH single systems)
5.1%	9.9%	Language Modeling with Highway LSTM	September 2017	HW-LSTM LM trained with Switchboard+Fisher+Gigaword+Broadcast News+Conversations, AM from previous IBM paper
5.1%		The Microsoft 2017 Conversational Speech Recognition System	August 2017	~2016 system + character-based dialog session aware (turns of speech) LSTM LM
5.3%	10.1%	Deep Learning-based Telephony Speech Recognition in the Wild	August 2017	Ensemble of 3 CNN-bLSTM (5.7% SWB / 11.3% CH single systems)
5.5%	10.3%	English Conversational Telephone Speech Recognition by Humans and Machines	March 2017	ResNet + BiLSTMs acoustic model, with 40d FMLLR + i-Vector inputs, trained on SWB+Fisher+CH, n-gram + model-M + LSTM + Strided (à trous) convs-based LM trained on Switchboard+Fisher+Gigaword+Broadcast
6.3%	11.9%	The Microsoft 2016 Conversational Speech Recognition System	September 2016	VGG/Resnet/LACE/BiLSTM acoustic model trained on SWB+Fisher+CH, N-gram + RNNLM language model trained on Switchboard+Fisher+Gigaword+Broadcast
6.3%	13.3%	An investigation of phone-based subword units for end-to-end speech recognition	April 2020	2 CNN + 24 layers Transformer encoder and 12 layers Transformer decoder model with char BPE and phoneme BPE units. Trained only on SWBD 300 hours.
6.6%	12.2%	The IBM 2016 English Conversational Telephone Speech Recognition System	June 2016	RNN + VGG + LSTM acoustic model trained on SWB+Fisher+CH, N-gram + "model M" + NNLM language model
6.8%	14.1%	SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition	April 2019	Listen Attend Spell
8.5%	13%	Purely sequence-trained neural networks for ASR based on lattice-free MMI	September 2016	HMM-BLSTM trained with MMI + data augmentation (speed) + iVectors + 3 regularizations + Fisher
9.2%	13.3%	Purely sequence-trained neural networks for ASR based on lattice-free MMI	September 2016	HMM-TDNN trained with MMI + data augmentation (speed) + iVectors + 3 regularizations + Fisher (10% / 15.1% respectively trained on SWBD only)
12.6%	16%	Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition	December 2014	CNN + Bi-RNN + CTC (speech to letters), 25.9% WER if trained only on SWB
11%	17.1%	A time delay neural network architecture for efficient modeling of long temporal contexts	2015	HMM-TDNN + iVectors
12.6%	18.4%	Sequence-discriminative training of deep neural networks	2013	HMM-DNN +sMBR
12.9%	19.3%	Audio Augmentation for Speech Recognition	2015	HMM-TDNN + pNorm + speed up/down speech
15%	19.1%	Building DNN Acoustic Models for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition	June 2014	DNN + Dropout
10.4%		Joint Training of Convolutional and Non-Convolutional Neural Networks	2014	CNN on MFSC/fbanks + 1 non-conv layer for FMLLR/I-Vectors concatenated in a DNN
11.5%		Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for LVCSR	2013	CNN
12.2%		Very Deep Multilingual Convolutional Neural Networks for LVCSR	September 2015	Deep CNN (10 conv, 4 FC layers), multi-scale feature maps
11.8%	25.7%	Improved training of end-to-end attention models for speech recognition	Interspeech, Sept 2018	encoder-attention-decoder end-to-end model, trained on 300h SWB

Rich Transcriptions

WER RT-02	WER RT-03	WER RT-04	Paper	Published	Notes
8.1%	8.0%		The CAPIO 2017 Conversational Speech Recognition System	April 2018	2 Dense LSTMs + 3 CNN-bLSTMs across 3 phonesets from previous Capio paper & AM adaptation using parameter averaging
8.2%	8.1%	7.7%	Language Modeling with Highway LSTM	September 2017	HW-LSTM LM trained with Switchboard+Fisher+Gigaword+Broadcast News+Conversations, AM from previous IBM paper
8.3%	8.0%	7.7%	English Conversational Telephone Speech Recognition by Humans and Machines	March 2017	ResNet + BiLSTMs acoustic model, with 40d FMLLR + i-Vector inputs, trained on SWB+Fisher+CH, n-gram + model-M + LSTM + Strided (à trous) convs-based LM trained on Switchboard+Fisher+Gigaword+Broadcast

Fisher (RT03S FSH)

WER	Paper	Published	Notes
9.6%	Purely sequence-trained neural networks for ASR based on lattice-free MMI	September 2016	HMM-BLSTM trained with MMI + data augmentation (speed) + iVectors + 3 regularizations + SWBD
9.8%	Purely sequence-trained neural networks for ASR based on lattice-free MMI	September 2016	HMM-TDNN trained with MMI + data augmentation (speed) + iVectors + 3 regularizations + SWBD

TED-LIUM

WER Test	Paper	Published	Notes
5.6%	The RWTH ASR System for TED-LIUM release 2: Improving Hybrid HMM with SpecAugment	April 2020	HMM-BLSTM + iVectors + SpecAugment + sMBR + Transformer LM
6.5%	The CAPIO 2017 Conversational Speech Recognition System	April 2018	TDNN + TDNN-LSTM + CNN-bLSTM + Dense TDNN-LSTM across two kinds of trees
11.2%	Purely sequence-trained neural networks for ASR based on lattice-free MMI	September 2016	HMM-TDNN trained with LF-MMI + data augmentation (speed perturbation) + iVectors + 3 regularizations
15.3%	TED-LIUM: an Automatic Speech Recognition dedicated corpus	May 2014	Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) with bottle-neck feature extraction

CHiME6 (multiarray noisy speech)

WER (fixed LM)	WER (unlimited LM)	Paper	Published	Notes
31.0%	30.5%	The USTC-NELSLIP Systems for CHiME-6 Challenge	May 2020	WPE + SSA + GSS + Data Augment (Speed, Volume) + SpecAugment + 8 AMs fusion (2 Single-feature AM + 6 Multi-feature AM)
35.1%	34.5%	The IOA Systems for CHiME-6 Challenge	May 2020	WPE + multi-stage GSS + SpecAugment + Data Augment (Noise, Reverberation, Speed) + 3 AMs fusion (CNN-TDNNF / CNN-TDNN-BLSTM / CNN-BLSTM)
35.8%	33.9%	The STC System for the CHiME-6 Challenge	May 2020	WPE + GSS + SpecAugment + 3 AMs fusion ( 2 TDNN-F / CNN-TDNNF + stats + SpecAugment + self-attention + sMBR) + MBR Decoding
51.3%	51.3%	CHiME-6 Challenge: Tackling Multispeaker Speech Recognition for Unsegmented Recordings	May 2020	WPE + GSS + Data Augment (Noise, Reverberation, Speed) + TDNNF

CHiME (noisy speech)

clean	real	sim	Paper	Published	Notes
3.34%	21.79%	45.05%	Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin	December 2015	9-layer model w/ 2 layers of 2D-invariant convolution & 7 recurrent layers, w/ 68M parameters
6.30%	67.94%	80.27%	Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition	December, 2014	CNN + Bi-RNN + CTC (speech to letters)

TODO

PER

TIMIT

(So far, all results trained on TIMIT and tested on the core test set.)

PER	Paper	Published	Notes
12.9%	Instantaneous Frequency Filter-Bank Features for Low Resource Speech Recognition Using Deep Recurrent Architectures	September 2021	Li-GRU with FMLLR + IFFB + FBANK + IFFB-FMLLR features
13.8%	The Pytorch-Kaldi Speech Recognition Toolkit	February 2019	MLP+Li-GRU+MLP on MFCC+FBANK+fMLLR. Silence phones are removed from reference and hypothesis transcripts!
14.9%	Light Gated Recurrent Units for Speech Recognition	March 2018	Removing the reset gate in GRU, using ReLU activation instead of tanh and batch normalization
16.5%	Phone recognition with hierarchical convolutional deep maxout networks	September 2015	Hierarchical maxout CNN + Dropout
16.5%	A Regularization Post Layer: An Additional Way how to Make Deep Neural Networks Robust	2017	DBN with last layer regularization
16.7%	Combining Time- and Frequency-Domain Convolution in Convolutional Neural Network-Based Phone Recognition	2014	CNN in time and frequency + dropout, 17.6% w/o dropout
16.8%	An investigation into instantaneous frequency estimation methods for improved speech recognition features	November 2017	DNN-HMM with MFCC + IFCC features
17.3%	Segmental Recurrent Neural Networks for End-to-end Speech Recognition	March 2016	RNN-CRF on 24(x3) MFSC
17.6%	Attention-Based Models for Speech Recognition	June 2015	Bi-RNN + Attention
17.7%	Speech Recognition with Deep Recurrent Neural Networks	March 2013	Bi-LSTM + skip connections w/ RNN transducer (18.4% with CTC only)
18.0%	Learning Filterbanks from Raw Speech for Phone Recognition	October 2017	Complex ConvNets on raw speech w/ mel-fbanks init
18.8%	Wavenet: A Generative Model For Raw Audio	September 2016	Wavenet architecture with mean pooling layer after residual block + few non-causal conv layers
23%	Deep Belief Networks for Phone Recognition	2009	(first, modern) HMM-DBN

LM

TODO

Noise-robust ASR

TODO

BigCorp™®-specific dataset

TODO?

Lexicon

• WER: word error rate
• PER: phone error rate
• LM: language model
• HMM: hidden markov model
• GMM: Gaussian mixture model
• DNN: deep neural network
• CNN: convolutional neural network
• DBN: deep belief network (RBM-based DNN)
• TDNN-F: a factored form of time delay neural networks (TDNN)
• RNN: recurrent neural network
• LSTM: long short-term memory
• CTC: connectionist temporal classification
• MMI: maximum mutual information (MMI),
• MPE: minimum phone error
• sMBR: state-level minimum Bayes risk
• SAT: speaker adaptive training
• MLLR: maximum likelihood linear regression
• FMLLR: Feature space Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression
• LDA: (in this context) linear discriminant analysis
• MFCC: Mel frequency cepstral coefficients
• FB/FBANKS/MFSC: Mel frequency spectral coefficients
• IFCC: Instantaneous frequency cosine coefficients (https://github.com/siplabiith/IFCC-Feature-Extraction)
• IFFB: Instantaneous frequency filter-bank features
• VGG: very deep convolutional neural networks from Visual Graphics Group, VGG is an architecture of 2 {3x3 convolutions} followed by 1 pooling, repeated