TeLeS: Temporal Lexeme Similarity Score to Estimate Confidence in End-to-End ASR

Abstract: Confidence estimation of predictions from an End-to-End (E2E) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model benefits ASR's downstream and upstream tasks. Class-probability-based confidence scores do not accurately represent the quality of overconfident ASR predictions. An ancillary Confidence Estimation Model (CEM) calibrates the predictions. State-of-the-art (SOTA) solutions use binary target scores for CEM training. However, the binary labels do not reveal the granular information of predicted words, such as temporal alignment between reference and hypothesis and whether the predicted word is entirely incorrect or contains spelling errors. Addressing this issue, we propose a novel Temporal-Lexeme Similarity (TeLeS) confidence score to train CEM. To address the data imbalance of target scores while training CEM, we use shrinkage loss to focus on hard-to-learn data points and minimise the impact of easily learned data points. We conduct experiments with ASR models trained in three languages, namely Hindi, Tamil, and Kannada, with varying training data sizes. Experiments show that TeLeS generalises well across domains. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method, we formulate a TeLeS-based Acquisition (TeLeS-A) function for sampling uncertainty in active learning. We observe a significant reduction in the Word Error Rate (WER) as compared to SOTA methods.