SITAR: A Situational Distortion Metric for Automatic Speech Recognition Evaluation

In automatic speech recognition (ASR), transcription errors with similar lexical or semantic discrepancies can have markedly different consequences for the situation conveyed by speech. Capturing these differences requires not merely contextual assessment, but an understanding of what the spoken discourse describes, establishes, or seeks to bring about. However, relying on LLM judges introduces computational cost and scoring variability. We introduce SITAR, a situational distortion metric for ASR, realized through a comprehensive end-to-end construction framework. Specifically, this framework aggregates situational severity and cumulative extent into a unified score via a bounded recursive formulation. Using targets derived from this formulation with limited offline LLM support, we train SITAR as a lightweight BERT-family regressor that scores reference–hypothesis pairs in a single forward pass, entirely free of any prohibitive runtime costs. Recognizing that introducing a new metric demands rigorous justification, we formalize a principled validation protocol spanning both extrinsic validity, assessed at macro and micro levels, and intrinsic scorer reliability. The former, evaluated across diverse datasets and models, demonstrates that SITAR reliably tracks broad capability scaling while providing orthogonal diagnostic utility, whereas the latter, examined on a purpose-built controlled benchmark, confirms the operational soundness of the scoring instrument itself. Through systematic validation, we demonstrate that SITAR holds strong potential as a practical, lightweight complement to existing ASR metrics.