Breaking the Script Barrier: Enabling Automatic Alignment for PoS-based ASR Error Analysis in Non-Latin Scripts

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are commonly evaluated using aggregate metrics such as Word Error Rate (WER), which do not capture the linguistic structure of errors. Fine-grained analysis, such as Part-of-Speech (PoS)-wise error characterization, requires accurate alignment between ASR hypotheses and reference transcriptions. However, existing alignment tools are often unreliable for languages written in non-Latin scripts. In this work, we address this gap by proposing a robust, automated, language-agnostic alignment mechanism applicable across ASR architectures and across languages written in both Latin and non-Latin scripts. This enables consistent alignment of hypotheses, references, and evaluation sequences, forming the basis for downstream linguistic analysis. Building on this, we employ standard PoS taggers to perform scalable and reproducible PoS-wise error analysis. Notably, we perform alignment and downstream ASR error analysis across three major segmented writing systems, namely, Abugida (Tamil, Hindi, Kannada), Alphabetic (English, Russian, Greek), and Abjad (Arabic). We further demonstrate how such error information can be leveraged during ASR training to improve metrics such as WER.

Structured Sparsity and Weight-adaptive Pruning for Memory and Compute efficient Whisper models

Whisper models have achieved remarkable progress in speech recognition; yet their large size remains a bottleneck for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. This paper proposes a framework to design fine-tuned variants of Whisper which address the above problem. Structured sparsity is enforced via the Sparse Group LASSO penalty as a loss regularizer, to reduce the number of FLOating Point operations (FLOPs). Further, a weight statistics aware pruning algorithm is proposed. We also design our custom text normalizer for WER evaluation. On Common Voice 11.0 Hindi dataset, we obtain, without degrading WER, (a) 35.4% reduction in model parameters, 14.25% lower memory consumption and 18.5% fewer FLOPs on Whisper-small, and (b) 31% reduction in model parameters, 15.29% lower memory consumption and 16.95% fewer FLOPs on Whisper-medium; and, (c) substantially outperform the state-of-the-art Iterative Magnitude Pruning based method by pruning 18.7% more parameters along with a 12.31 reduction in WER.