PRiSM: Benchmarking Phone Realization in Speech Models
This work addresses the need for robust phonetic evaluation in speech models for clinical, educational, and multilingual applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing PR systems.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating phone recognition systems beyond surface-level accuracy by introducing PRiSM, an open-source benchmark that includes intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations, finding that diverse language exposure improves performance and encoder-CTC models are most stable.
Phone recognition (PR) serves as the atomic interface for language-agnostic modeling for cross-lingual speech processing and phonetic analysis. Despite prolonged efforts in developing PR systems, current evaluations only measure surface-level transcription accuracy. We introduce PRiSM, the first open-source benchmark designed to expose blind spots in phonetic perception through intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of PR systems. PRiSM standardizes transcription-based evaluation and assesses downstream utility in clinical, educational, and multilingual settings with transcription and representation probes. We find that diverse language exposure during training is key to PR performance, encoder-CTC models are the most stable, and specialized PR models still outperform Large Audio Language Models. PRiSM releases code, recipes, and datasets to move the field toward multilingual speech models with robust phonetic ability: https://github.com/changelinglab/prism.