Goodness-of-pronunciation without phoneme time alignment

We present a phoneme-level analysis of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for two low-resourced and phonologically complex East Caucasian languages, Archi and Rutul, based on curated and standardized speech-transcript resources totaling approximately 50 minutes and 1 hour 20 minutes of audio, respectively. Existing recordings and transcriptions are consolidated and processed into a form suitable for ASR training and evaluation. We evaluate several state-of-the-art audio and audio-language models, including wav2vec2, Whisper, and Qwen2-Audio. For wav2vec2, we introduce a language-specific phoneme vocabulary with heuristic output-layer initialization, which yields consistent improvements and achieves performance comparable to or exceeding Whisper in these extremely low-resource settings. Beyond standard word and character error rates, we conduct a detailed phoneme-level error analysis. We find that phoneme recognition accuracy strongly correlates with training frequency, exhibiting a characteristic sigmoid-shaped learning curve. For Archi, this relationship partially breaks for Whisper, pointing to model-specific generalization effects beyond what is predicted by training frequency. Overall, our results indicate that many errors attributed to phonological complexity are better explained by data scarcity. These findings demonstrate the value of phoneme-level evaluation for understanding ASR behavior in low-resource, typologically complex languages.

Forced alignment evaluation typically requires manually annotated timestamps, limiting large-scale and multilingual analysis. We introduce two corpus-level metrics based on self-supervised (SSL) speech representations for reference-free forced alignment evaluation: Phoneme-Cluster Mutual Information (PCMI) and Word Acoustic Consistency Score (WACS). PCMI measures agreement between aligned phoneme labels and clusters induced from SSL-speech representations, while WACS measures consistency of repeated word realizations using dynamic time warping similarity between word representation sequences. Using both random and systematic perturbations, we show that PCMI and WACS degrade consistently under alignment perturbations. We further analyze the metrics across multiple alignment systems on 85 languages from FLEURS, validate them against manually annotated alignments from 45 languages in DoReCo, and evaluate them on two phonologically complex low-resource languages. The metrics effectively separate high- and low-quality alignments and correlate strongly with timestamp-based alignment quality measures. Our results demonstrate that SSL-speech representations enable scalable, reference-free forced alignment evaluation. The metrics are available as an open-source Python package at https://github.com/mahesh-ak/forced-aligner-metrics.

Speech large language models (speech LLMs) perform well on automatic speech recognition (ASR) when sufficient paired speech-text data is available, but their performance degrades in low-resource settings. A cascaded pipeline that performs speech-to-phoneme (S2P) conversion followed by phoneme-to-grapheme (P2G) conversion has been shown to outperform end-to-end speech LLMs in this regime, suggesting that phoneme-mediated processing is beneficial when paired data is scarce. We propose phoneme-guided initialization, a simple method that uses this insight within an end-to-end framework: we pre-train the audio encoder on S2P and the LLM on P2G tasks, then connect them and fine-tune the full model end-to-end on the target ASR task. Experiments on Japanese (CSJ), Chinese (AISHELL-1), and two low-resource languages from Common Voice 25.0 (Tatar and Urdu) show that our method matches or outperforms both the cascaded S2P-P2G baseline and the end-to-end model without P2G initialization.