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arXiv · 2509.25516

Beyond WER: Probing Whisper's Sub-token Decoder Across Diverse Language Resource Levels

Siyu Liang·Nicolas Ballier·Gina-Anne Levow·Richard Wright
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Abstract

While large multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) models achieve remarkable performance, the internal mechanisms of the end-to-end pipeline, particularly concerning fairness and efficacy across languages, remain underexplored. This paper introduces a fine-grained analysis of Whisper's multilingual decoder, examining its sub-token hypotheses during transcription across languages with various resource levels. Our method traces the beam search path, capturing sub-token guesses and their associated probabilities. Results reveal that higher resource languages benefit from higher likelihood of the correct token being top-ranked, greater confidence, lower predictive entropy, and more diverse alternative candidates. Lower resource languages fare worse on these metrics, but also exhibit distinct clustering patterns in sub-token usage sometimes influenced by typology in our PCA and t-SNE analysis. This sub-token probing uncovers systematic decoding disparities masked by aggregate error rates and points towards targeted interventions to ameliorate the imbalanced development of speech technology.

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Siyu Liang, Nicolas Ballier, Gina-Anne Levow, Richard Wright. 2025-09-29. Beyond WER: Probing Whisper's Sub-token Decoder Across Diverse Language Resource Levels. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25516

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