Towards Robust Dysarthric Speech Recognition: LLM-Agent Post-ASR Correction Beyond WER

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Authors: Xiuwen Zheng, Sixun Dong, Bornali Phukon, Mark Hasegawa‐Johnson, Chang D. Yoo
Cited by: 0

Abstract

While Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is typically benchmarked by word error rate (WER), real-world applications ultimately hinge on semantic fidelity. This mismatch is particularly problematic for dysarthric speech, where articulatory imprecision and disfluencies can cause severe semantic distortions. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Large Language Model (LLM)-based agent for post-ASR correction: a Judge-Editor over the top-k ASR hypotheses that keeps high-confidence spans, rewrites uncertain segments, and operates in both zero-shot and fine-tuned modes. In parallel, we release SAP-Hypo5, the largest benchmark for dysarthric speech correction, to enable reproducibility and future exploration. Under multi-perspective evaluation, our agent achieves a 14.51% WER reduction alongside substantial semantic gains, including a +7.59 pp improvement in MENLI and +7.66 pp in Slot Micro F1 on challenging samples. Our analysis further reveals that WER is highly sensitive to domain shift, whereas semantic metrics correlate more closely with downstream task performance.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Speech Recognition and Synthesis Speech and dialogue systems Speech and Audio Processing

Publication details

Journal / source
KAIST Institutional Repository (KAIST)
Publication date
29 January 2026
Language
EN