Discourse on ASR Measurement: Introducing the ARPOCA Assessment Tool

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has evolved from a pipeline architecture with pronunciation dictionaries, phonetic features and language models to the end-to-end systems performing a direct translation from a raw waveform into a word sequence. With the increase in accuracy and the availability of pre-trained models, the ASR systems are now omnipresent in our daily applications. On the other hand, the models' interpretability and their computational cost have become more challenging, particularly when dealing with less-common languages or identifying regional variations of speakers. This research proposal will follow a four-stage process: 1) Proving an overview of acoustic features and feature extraction algorithms; 2) Exploring current ASR models, tools, and performance assessment techniques; 3) Aligning features with interpretable phonetic transcripts; and 4) Designing a prototype ARPOCA to increase awareness of regional language variation and improve models feedback by developing a semi-automatic acoustic features extraction using PRAAT in conjunction with phonetic transcription.