Fact · Speech recognition
The 2004 review by Morris, Maier and Green cites a 1982 workshop paper by Woodard and Nelson as the source for the definition of WER for isolated word recognition.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“Woodard, J.P. & Nelson, J.T. "An information theoretic measure of speech recognition performance", Workshop on standardisation for speech I/O technology, Naval Air Development Center, Warminster, PA, 1982.”
From WER and RIL to MER and WIL: Improved Evaluation Measures for Connected Speech Recognition, Andrew Cameron Morris et al., Proceedings of Interspeech 2004, ISCA, 2004, References, item [10].
Open the original- What it measures
- Morris and colleagues write that for isolated word recognition, WER is defined with a citation to this reference. The 1982 paper itself was not read for this fact.
- What it does not show
- We read the reference list of the 2004 paper, not the 1982 workshop paper. The reference is a workshop report, so it may be hard to obtain.