English

Understanding Zero-shot Rare Word Recognition Improvements Through LLM Integration

Computation and Language 2025-02-25 v1 Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the integration of a large language model (LLM) with an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, specifically focusing on enhancing rare word recognition performance. Using a 190,000-hour dataset primarily sourced from YouTube, pre-processed with Whisper V3 pseudo-labeling, we demonstrate that the LLM-ASR architecture outperforms traditional Zipformer-Transducer models in the zero-shot rare word recognition task, after training on a large dataset. Our analysis reveals that the LLM contributes significantly to improvements in rare word error rate (R-WER), while the speech encoder primarily determines overall transcription performance (Orthographic Word Error Rate, O-WER, and Normalized Word Error Rate, N-WER). Through extensive ablation studies, we highlight the importance of adapter integration in aligning speech encoder outputs with the LLM's linguistic capabilities. Furthermore, we emphasize the critical role of high-quality labeled data in achieving optimal performance. These findings provide valuable insights into the synergy between LLM-based ASR architectures, paving the way for future advancements in large-scale LLM-based speech recognition systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.16142,
  title  = {Understanding Zero-shot Rare Word Recognition Improvements Through LLM Integration},
  author = {Haoxuan Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.16142},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:53:52.997Z