Fact · Speech recognition
0, 3, 3, 4alignment cost weights
The sclite scoring program aligns words with a cost of 0 for a correct word, 3 for an insertion, 3 for a deletion and 4 for a substitution.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“weights the cost of correct words, insertions, deletions and substitutions as 0, 3, 3 and 4 respectively”
sclite: Score Speech Recognition System Output (NIST Scoring Toolkit documentation), NIST Speech Group, NIST Speech Recognition Scoring Toolkit (SCTK), documentation hosted at MIT, n.d., Dynamic Programming string alignment section.
Open the original- What it measures
- These weights decide which alignment is chosen when several alignments have similar edit counts. The final WER is still computed from the chosen counts of substitutions, deletions and insertions.
- What it does not show
- This is the version 1.2 manual. Newer releases of the NIST toolkit may use other defaults, so check the version you run before comparing scores.