Introduction to Word Error Rate (WER)
When it comes to evaluating the accuracy of speech recognition systems, the Word Error Rate (WER) is often the go-to metric. But what exactly is WER, and why is it so widely used? In simple terms, WER measures the number of errors in a transcribed text compared to the original spoken words. It's calculated by summing up the substitutions, deletions, and insertions needed to transform the transcribed text into the reference text, then dividing by the total number of words in the reference.