Results
Table with columns: Model, Test WER| Model | Test WER |
|---|
openai/whisper-small (baseline) | 21.30% |
whisper-small-accented-en (this model) | 15.53% |
WER measured with jiwer against gold
transcripts on a speaker-disjoint held-out split (no test speaker appears in
training).
Intended use
Transcription of read/prepared English speech from non-native speakers. It is a
research/portfolio model and is not deployed in any production system.
How to use
from transformers import pipeline
asr = pipeline(
"automatic-speech-recognition",
model="katherineahn/whisper-small-accented-en",
)
print(asr("audio.wav")["text"])
Training data
A subset of facebook/voxpopuli,
config en_accented: European Parliament recordings from non-native English
speakers spanning 15 first-language backgrounds. Filtered to examples with gold
transcripts, then split speaker-disjoint (364 speakers, 54 held out) and capped at
3,000 training / 400 test clips. A small number of clips that failed to decode
were skipped.
Training procedure
Fine-tuned with the Hugging Face Seq2SeqTrainer on a single Tesla T4 GPU.
- Base model:
openai/whisper-small (~242M parameters)
- Steps: 600 (~14.5 minutes)
- Training loss: ~0.96 -> ~0.25
Limitations
whisper-small is a small model; larger Whisper variants will transcribe more
accurately at the cost of speed and memory.
- Training data is read parliamentary speech, so accuracy may drop on
spontaneous, conversational, or noisy audio.
- Evaluated on a 400-clip held-out set; treat the reported WER as an estimate.
Citation
Base model: Radford et al., Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak
Supervision (Whisper). Dataset: Wang et al., VoxPopuli.