Generative vs. Encoder Large Language Models for ASR Evaluation: A Comparative Study

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25574v1
• Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:36:48 GMT
• Title: Generative vs. Encoder Large Language Models for ASR Evaluation: A Comparative Study
• Abstract summary: We analyze BERTScore and SemDist across different Large Language Models (LLMs) for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) evaluation.<n>Our results show that encoder-based metrics remain highly competitive, while generative LLMs perform strongly in hypothesis comparison and improve the interpretability of ASR evaluation.
• Score: 13.666045109234107
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is typically evaluated using Word Error Rate (WER), which poorly reflects semantic similarity. While embedding-based metrics correlate better with human judgments, the respective roles of encoder and decoder-based Large Language Models (LLMs) remain underexplored. This paper presents a comparative study of both families for ASR evaluation. We analyze BERTScore and SemDist across different LLMs, layers, and pooling strategies, showing that both metrics can achieve strong correlation with human judgments when properly configured. For decoder models, we investigate generative LLMs in two settings: pairwise hypothesis selection via prompting and direct qualitative error classification. Our results show that encoder-based metrics remain highly competitive, while generative LLMs perform strongly in hypothesis comparison and improve the interpretability of ASR evaluation.

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