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Evaluate ASR and Summarization Metrics

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Your question is Evaluate ASR and Summarization Metrics. Take a moment with it on the right.

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Problem

Context

VoxNote is evaluating two production language systems: an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for meeting transcripts and an NLP summarization model that generates meeting recaps. Product complaints increased after a recent model refresh: transcript quality is worse on noisy calls, while summaries are shorter but omit action items.

Current Performance

ModelMetricBaselineCurrentChange
ASRWord Error Rate (WER)11.8%16.4%+4.6 pts
ASRSentence Error Rate (SER)21.0%29.7%+8.7 pts
ASRNamed Entity Error Rate9.5%18.2%+8.7 pts
ASRReal-time factor0.720.61Improved
SummarizationROUGE-10.4620.438-0.024
SummarizationROUGE-L0.4010.356-0.045
SummarizationBLEU0.2140.191-0.023
SummarizationHuman factuality score (1-5)4.33.6-0.7
SummarizationAction item recall0.810.63-0.18

The Problem

Leadership wants to know which metrics should be used to evaluate each system, how to interpret the current results, and whether the refresh should be rolled back or improved in-place.

Requirements

  1. Explain which metrics are most appropriate for ASR versus summarization and why.
  2. Interpret the metric changes and identify the most likely quality regressions.
  3. Recommend an error analysis plan for both models.
  4. Propose specific model or evaluation improvements.
  5. Discuss which metrics should be primary for launch decisions versus secondary diagnostics.

Constraints

  • ASR latency must stay below a real-time factor of 0.70.
  • Summaries must fit within 120 words on average.
  • Enterprise customers care disproportionately about names, dates, and action items.