Fact · Speech recognition
Kim and colleagues write that WER takes into account only literal correctness, not semantic correctness, which matters for downstream language understanding.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“WER takes into consideration only literal correctness instead of semantic correctness”
Semantic Distance: A New Metric for ASR Performance Analysis Towards Spoken Language Understanding, Suyoun Kim et al., Proceedings of Interspeech 2021, ISCA, 2021, Abstract.
Open the original- What it measures
- The authors tested their semantic distance metric on intent recognition, slot filling and semantic parsing.
- What it does not show
- The claim is the authors' motivation for a new metric. Semantic distance has not replaced WER as the standard measure for transcription quality.