English

Preference-ASR: A Preference-Aware Test Set for Benchmarking ASR in the Era of Speech LLMs

Computation and Language 2026-06-28 v1 Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

Popular ASR test sets adopt inconsistent conventions for numbers, disfluencies, entities, and casing, while standard normalizers erase the format distinctions users care about. Current benchmarks therefore cannot measure whether a model follows user preferences for output style. We introduce PreferenceASR, a test set evaluating ASR systems on their ability to follow natural-language preference instructions across four categories: normalization, entities, disfluencies, and case. Built from seven open-source corpora via a two-stage LLM-assisted pipeline with human verification, it is evaluated with a preference-aware normalizer that selectively skips steps matching the active instruction. Benchmarking four models shows rankings shift across preference types, exposing quality differences traditional evaluation obscures. We publicly release the dataset.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.29534,
  title  = {Preference-ASR: A Preference-Aware Test Set for Benchmarking ASR in the Era of Speech LLMs},
  author = {Nithin Rao Koluguri and Sasha Meister and Nikolay Karpov and Piotr Zelasko and Desh Raj and Jagadeesh Balam and Boris Ginsburg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.29534},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at Interspeech 2026