agwer 0.3.0

Agentic WER: WER/MER/WIL/WIP/CER plus RIR, HER, and n-best oracles for evaluating ASR error correctors and voice agents. Self-contained, single dependency (RapidFuzz).

AgWER: Agent-oriented Word Error Rate

agwer is a simple and fast Python package to evaluate speech recognition and voice agents. It is self-contained: one dependency (RapidFuzz, C++ edit distance), a 40 KB wheel, and it imports in under 20 ms.

It supports the classic ASR similarity measures and the agentic ones:

1. word error rate (WER), plus match error rate (MER) and word information lost/preserved (WIL/WIP)
2. character error rate (CER)
3. Recoverable Information Ratio (RIR, the paper's ρ)
4. Harmful Edit Rate (HER)

The agentic measures (3 and 4) evaluate systems that read $n$-best hypotheses and decide when to edit and when to abstain, such as LLM error correctors and dictation agents:

measure	question it answers
RIR: Recoverable Information Ratio (ρ)	How much of the gap between the 1-best and the oracle did the correction close? ρ>1 beats the n-best oracle; ρ<0 is the damage regime.
HER: Harmful Edit Rate	Of the edits actually made, what fraction broke a correct token? Isolates over-correction.
o_nb / o_cp	The two HyPoradise oracles: best single hypothesis (the reranking bound) and best token recombination (the correction bound).

Installation

With uv:

uv add agwer             # as a project dependency
uv pip install agwer     # into the active environment

Or with pip (Python >= 3.9):

pip install agwer

Usage

The simplest use case is computing the word error rate of a dictated utterance:

from agwer import wer

ref  = "please schedule the quarterly budget review for tuesday march twenty first at nine thirty and invite the design team"
asr_decoded = "please schedule the quarterly budget review for tuesday march twenty first at nine thirty and invite the desire team"

wer(ref, asr_decoded)   # 0.0526, one broken word in nineteen

All measures accept a single string or a list of strings. Lists are pooled corpus-level (total errors over total reference words), and mer, wil, wip, cer work the same way:

import agwer

refs = ["send the revised contract to the legal team before the board meeting on friday afternoon",
        "remind me to pick up the prescription from the pharmacy after the dentist appointment"]
hyps = ["send the revised contract to the legal team before the bored meeting on friday afternoon",
        "remind me to pick up the prescription from the pharmacy after the dentist appointment"]

agwer.wer(refs, hyps)     # 0.0345, corpus WER
agwer.cer(refs, hyps)     # 0.0116, corpus CER

Evaluating a corrector or voice agent

With $n$-best input, one call computes everything. This is a real Whisper 5-best decode from the MIT-licensed HyPoradise benchmark (WSJ): a 23-word dictated stock quote where the ASR merges the spelled ticker and garbles the fractions. The spelled form "i b m" survives in no hypothesis:

ref = "i b m fell one and seven eighths to one hundred twenty and three eighths on more than two point five million shares"

nbest = [[   # real Whisper 5-best; nbest[i][0] is the 1-best
    "ibm fell one seven eight to one hundred and twenty three eight on more than two point five million shares",
    "ibm fell one point seven eight to one hundred and twenty point three eight on more than two point five million shares",
    "ibm fell one and seven eighths to one hundred and twenty and three eighths on more than two point five million shares",
    "ibm fell one point seven eights to one hundred and twenty point three eights on more than two point five million shares",
    "ibm fell one seven eighths to one hundred and twenty three eighths on more than two point five million shares",
]]
corrected = [ref]   # a corrector that resolves the ticker and fractions from context

out = agwer.evaluate([ref], corrected, nbest=nbest)
out.wer_1best            # 0.3478  the raw ASR broke a third of the quote
out.wer_oracle           # 0.1739  o_nb: the best single hypothesis still has 4 errors
out.wer_compositional    # 0.1304  o_cp: no token recombination can spell "i b m"
out.wer_corrected        # 0.0
out.rir                  # 2.0     twice the n-best headroom: generative correction
out.her                  # 0.0     and nothing broken

Real decodes also show why reranking alone cannot save a voice agent. In another HyPoradise utterance, the command "leaving after noon" comes back as "leaving afternoon" in all five hypotheses. The query's meaning flips, every reranker is helpless, and only a corrector (and agwer's oracles) can see it.

Vibe-coding dictation: when the agent beats every hypothesis (ρ > 1)

Dictating to a coding agent is the hardest case, because package names and code terms are exactly what ASR mangles. Here the 1-best hears "you v pip install ag where" and "pie test", and the package name agwer appears in no hypothesis. No reranker, and not even the compositional oracle, can fully recover the command. The coding agent can, because it knows the package from context:

ref = ("open a terminal run uv pip install agwer then write a pytest that checks "
       "the word error rate of the two transcripts stays below five percent")

nbest = [[  # 26-word dictation; ASR breaks the technical terms
    "open a terminal run you v pip install ag where then write a pie test that checks "
    "the word error rate of the two transcripts stays below five percent",
    "open a terminal run uv pip install a g wear then write a pytest that checks "
    "the word error rate of the two transcripts stays below five percent",
    "open a terminal run you've pip installed ag where then write a pie test that checks "
    "the word error rate of the two transcript stays below five percent",
]]
corrected = [ref]   # the agent reconstructs 'uv pip install agwer' and 'pytest'

out = agwer.evaluate([ref], corrected, nbest=nbest)
out.wer_1best            # 0.2308  the raw ASR broke almost a quarter of the command
out.wer_oracle           # 0.1154  the best single hypothesis still has 3 errors
out.wer_compositional    # 0.0385  even recombining all tokens cannot spell 'agwer'
out.wer_corrected        # 0.0
out.rir                  # 2.0     recovered twice the n-best headroom
out.her                  # 0.0     and broke nothing

ρ > 1 is the signature of generative correction: the agent supplied truth that exists nowhere in the hypothesis list. Plain WER, reranking metrics, and even oracle bounds cannot see this. RIR was built to measure it.

Entity F1 and Word Hallucination Rate

Two failure modes that plain WER cannot name. First, entity errors hide inside acceptable WER: one substituted amount in a 21-word transfer request is a comfortable 4.8% WER and a broken transaction. entity_f1 scores an explicit token subset with the same alignment engine as WER:

m = agwer.entity_f1(ref, hyp, entities={"five", "hundred"})
m["recall"], m["f1"]                      # 0.5, the layer WER hid
agwer.entity_f1(refs, hyps, predicate=agwer.numeric_tokens)   # digits and spelled numbers

Second, LLM correctors make text up, and the two mechanisms differ. A corrector can invent a word the ASR never produced, or it can loop autoregressively and repeat words it really heard (one system in arXiv:2408.16180 repeats a real segment eleven times, so a vocabulary check sees nothing wrong). word_hallucination_rate uses occurrence-bounded attribution to catch both, works with a single 1-best or a full n-best list, and never penalizes copying an ASR error or a correct generative recovery:

m = agwer.word_hallucination_rate(refs, outputs, onebest_or_nbest)
m["whr"]                          # hallucinated tokens / output tokens
m["novel_hallucinations"]         # invented words
m["repetition_hallucinations"]    # autoregressive loops over heard words
m["passed_through_errors"]        # copied ASR errors: not hallucination
m["generative_tokens"]            # correct words no hypothesis contained

HER comes in two granularities. her_granularity="utterance" (the default) is the accounting behind the paper's reported values, and "token" follows the formal per-edit definition. A sentence where the corrector fixes one token and breaks another is neutral at utterance granularity but helpful=1, harmful=1 at token granularity, so report which one you used.

Normalization

Normalization is the main reason WER numbers are incomparable across papers. Every entry point takes normalize= (any Callable[[str], str]), and agwer ships the standards.

A dictation agent that says amounts out loud looks 87% wrong against the written form, until you normalize:

ref = "the invoice total came to $1,250.75 after the 15% discount was applied on march 3rd"
hyp = ("the invoice total came to one thousand two hundred fifty dollars "
       "and seventy five cents after the fifteen percent discount was applied on march third")

agwer.wer(ref, hyp)                                          # 0.867 (!)
agwer.wer(ref, hyp, normalize=agwer.EnglishTextNormalizer())  # 0.0

normalizer	what it does
None (the general measures' default)	scores strings exactly as given
agwer.default_normalize (the agentic default)	conservative: lowercase, keep apostrophes, strip other punctuation
BasicTextNormalizer()	language-agnostic: symbols, brackets, optional diacritic folding
EnglishTextNormalizer()	the Whisper English normalizer: spelled numbers to digits, currency, contractions, British to American spelling; cached=True adds an LRU for agent loops

The Whisper normalizers are vendored (MIT, © 2022 OpenAI, attribution included) with behavior pinned byte-identical to the original by golden tests. Report which normalizer you used; it is part of the metric.

CLI

agwer results.jsonl                 # {"reference","corrected","nbest"} per line
agwer results.jsonl --json --her-granularity token

Performance

The hot path is batched RapidFuzz, and every aggregate agwer computes is count-additive, so large corpora parallelize exactly. Results are identical for any worker count: evaluate(..., workers=8).

Typical performance on Apple Silicon (M-series, 14 cores) for the full agentic evaluation (three WERs, both oracles, RIR, and HER) of 5-best corpora:

scenario	time
10k utterances (single-threaded)	~0.2 s
100k utterances (single-threaded)	2.6 s
100k utterances (8 workers)	0.48 s (5.5×)
1M utterances (single-threaded)	27.9 s
1M utterances (8 workers)	5.2 s (5.4×)

Workers pay process startup, so they win from roughly 100k utterances up. On macOS and Windows, call from a if __name__ == "__main__" guard, as with any multiprocessing. Reproduce on your machine:

python -m agwer.bench --workers 8

Apple Silicon

agwer is native on Apple Silicon out of the box, with no separate install: pip and uv select the arm64 wheel automatically, and RapidFuzz ships compiled arm64-darwin extensions, so the C++ edit-distance core runs natively on M-series machines. workers= then scales the whole pipeline across performance cores (see the table above). Planned next is an optional agwer[mlx] extra for embedding-based semantic metrics on the Apple GPU via MLX. Semantic inference is the one place extra hardware genuinely helps; edit distance does not need it.

Compatibility & reproducibility

Measure semantics match jiwer, validated bit-identical on a 600-corpus golden set pinned in tests/.

agwer gratefully builds on three projects:

• jiwer defined the measure semantics and the easy, friendly API style this package follows.
• OpenAI Whisper created the English text normalizer that became the community standard for ASR evaluation. We vendor it faithfully under its MIT license, with attribution.
• NVIDIA NeMo text processing sets the bar for full text normalization across languages. Its semiotic class taxonomy guides our normalization roadmap.

License

Apache-2.0. Vendored Whisper normalizers: MIT (see src/agwer/normalizers/LICENSE_WHISPER).