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arXiv · 2505.23627

Prompting Whisper for Improved Verbatim Transcription and End-to-end Miscue Detection

Abstract

Identifying mistakes (i.e., miscues) made while reading aloud is commonly approached post-hoc by comparing automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions to the target reading text. However, post-hoc methods perform poorly when ASR inaccurately transcribes verbatim speech. To improve on current methods for reading error annotation, we propose a novel end-to-end architecture that incorporates the target reading text via prompting and is trained for both improved verbatim transcription and direct miscue detection. Our contributions include: first, demonstrating that incorporating reading text through prompting benefits verbatim transcription performance over fine-tuning, and second, showing that it is feasible to augment speech recognition tasks for end-to-end miscue detection. We conducted two case studies -- children's read-aloud and adult atypical speech -- and found that our proposed strategies improve verbatim transcription and miscue detection compared to current state-of-the-art.

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BibTeXRIS

Griffin Dietz Smith, Dianna Yee, Jennifer King Chen, Leah Findlater. 2025-05-29. Prompting Whisper for Improved Verbatim Transcription and End-to-end Miscue Detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23627

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