Fact · Speech recognition
In the 2024 Mandarin stuttering challenge, character error rate counts the minimum number of insertions, substitutions and deletions needed to turn the recognizer output into the reference.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“the minimum number of insertions (Ins), substitutions (Subs), and deletions (Del) required to transform”
Findings of the 2024 Mandarin Stuttering Event Detection and Automatic Speech Recognition Challenge, Hongfei Xue et al., arXiv (eess.AS), 2024, Track II, evaluation metric.
Open the original- What it measures
- Character error rate uses the same edit-distance idea as WER, with characters as the unit instead of words. It is common for Mandarin, which has no spaces between words.
- What it does not show
- Defined for this challenge's scoring. Spaces and punctuation handling can differ between Mandarin benchmarks.