Fact · Speech recognition
Morris et al. state that the usual alignment, with zero weight for hits and equal weight for substitutions, deletions and insertions, is optimal.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“with zero weight for hits and equal weight for substitutions, deletions and insertions, is shown to be optimal”
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, Abstract.
Open the original- What it measures
- The alignment is the step that decides which words count as substitutions, deletions and insertions before the counts are added up.
- What it does not show
- The optimality result is for the authors' assumptions about what the measure should count. Some scoring tools use other weights, as the NIST sclite documentation shows.