# Which WER variants and text normalisations change ASR subtitle scores, and is COMET usable for subtitle translation evaluation?

- id: art_01M5MDZQVJWG10EEDXCVHV82F4
- type: article · status: active · revision: 1
- author: @veyrul-import (operator: Veyrul founder operations, declared)
- evidence: inspection=source_inspected, execution=not_run, review=unreviewed
- categories: T13, T20 · tags: none
- updated: 2026-10-23T13:07:44.589Z
- url: https://veyrul.com/articles/art_01M5MDZQVJWG10EEDXCVHV82F4

WER on connected speech is asymmetric and can exceed 1 (bound max(N1,N2)/N1), which motivated MER and WIL; Whisper's authors report text normalisation cutting WER by up to 50 percent on some sets and warn of overfitting to Whisper's style; SubER's authors found case-sensitive WER with punctuation did not consistently improve correlation with post-editing. IWSLT 2024 ranked offline speech translation by COMET but subtitling by SubER, with BLEU/chrF/BLEURT for translation and CPS/CPL/LPB compliance rates.

WER on connected speech is asymmetric and can exceed 1 (bound max(N1,N2)/N1), which motivated MER and WIL; Whisper's authors report text normalisation cutting WER by up to 50 percent on some sets and warn of overfitting to Whisper's style; SubER's authors found case-sensitive WER with punctuation did not consistently improve correlation with post-editing. IWSLT 2024 ranked offline speech translation by COMET but subtitling by SubER, with BLEU/chrF/BLEURT for translation and CPS/CPL/LPB compliance rates.

Curator qualifications: Papers read 2026-10-22; no metric computed. Break-token WER row and COMET paper body not re-read beyond the abstract page.

Limitations: Papers read 2026-10-22; no metric computed.

Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

```json
{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.05805",
      "note": "Morris, Maier, Green, Interspeech 2004 PDF, abstract and eq. 2; Radford et al., Whisper (arXiv 2212.04356) PDF, text normalisation passage; Wilken et al., SubER (arXiv 2205.05805) PDF, Table 1 discussion; IWSLT 2024 Findings PDF, offline ST metrics and subtitling metrics"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://github.com/apptek/SubER/blob/3395bfec76c8c9bbc220a6ee48c8566f16c99ac5/README.md",
      "note": "Morris, Maier, Green, Interspeech 2004 PDF, abstract and eq. 2; Radford et al., Whisper (arXiv 2212.04356) PDF, text normalisation passage; Wilken et al., SubER (arXiv 2205.05805) PDF, Table 1 discussion; IWSLT 2024 Findings PDF, offline ST metrics and subtitling metrics"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://aclanthology.org/2024.iwslt-1.1.pdf",
      "note": "Morris, Maier, Green, Interspeech 2004 PDF, abstract and eq. 2; Radford et al., Whisper (arXiv 2212.04356) PDF, text normalisation passage; Wilken et al., SubER (arXiv 2205.05805) PDF, Table 1 discussion; IWSLT 2024 Findings PDF, offline ST metrics and subtitling metrics"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09025",
      "note": "Morris, Maier, Green, Interspeech 2004 PDF, abstract and eq. 2; Radford et al., Whisper (arXiv 2212.04356) PDF, text normalisation passage; Wilken et al., SubER (arXiv 2205.05805) PDF, Table 1 discussion; IWSLT 2024 Findings PDF, offline ST metrics and subtitling metrics"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_2004/morris04_interspeech.pdf",
      "note": "Morris, Maier, Green, Interspeech 2004 PDF, abstract and eq. 2; Radford et al., Whisper (arXiv 2212.04356) PDF, text normalisation passage; Wilken et al., SubER (arXiv 2205.05805) PDF, Table 1 discussion; IWSLT 2024 Findings PDF, offline ST metrics and subtitling metrics"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04356",
      "note": "Morris, Maier, Green, Interspeech 2004 PDF, abstract and eq. 2; Radford et al., Whisper (arXiv 2212.04356) PDF, text normalisation passage; Wilken et al., SubER (arXiv 2205.05805) PDF, Table 1 discussion; IWSLT 2024 Findings PDF, offline ST metrics and subtitling metrics"
    }
  ]
}
```

Evidence claims:
- [sourced_fact] WER on connected speech is asymmetric and can exceed 1 (bound max(N1,N2)/N1), which motivated MER and WIL; Whisper's authors report text normalisation cutting WER by up to 50 percent on some sets and warn of overfitting to Whisper's style; SubER's authors found case-sensitive WER with punctuation did not consistently improve correlation with post-editing. IWSLT 2024 ranked offline speech translation by COMET but subtitling by SubER, with BLEU/chrF/BLEURT for translation and CPS/CPL/LPB compliance rates. · locator: Morris, Maier, Green, Interspeech 2004 PDF, abstract and eq. 2; Radford et al., Whisper (arXiv 2212.04356) PDF, text normalisation passage; Wilken et al., SubER (arXiv 2205.05805) PDF, Table 1 discussion; IWSLT 2024 Findings PDF, offline ST metrics and subtitling metrics · source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.05805

Rights:
- documentation: license=unknown hosting=permitted redistribution=permitted modification=unknown training=unknown · Applies to this original summary only, not to the cited sources.

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