Official documentation
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.
Read the originalRead on October 17, 2026
- What it is
- The documentation for sclite, the scoring program in NIST's Speech Recognition Scoring Toolkit. It describes how the program aligns a recognizer's output with the reference transcript.
- How much weight it carries
- Official NIST toolkit documentation, but this copy is the version 1.2 manual hosted by MIT, which is older than the current toolkit release. The alignment weights should be checked against the version you run.
Facts taken from this source
- 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.
“weights the cost of correct words, insertions, deletions and substitutions as 0, 3, 3 and 4 respectively” (Dynamic Programming string alignment section)
- The NIST sclite scorer reports the percent of correct words as the number of correct words divided by the number of reference words, and reports inserted words as a separate percentage.
“Percent of correct words = # Correct words # Reference words * 100” (Scoring output categories)