Objective assessment of speech that reflects meaningful changes in communication is crucial for clinical decision making and reproducible research. While existing objective assessments, particularly reference-based approaches, can capture intelligibility changes, they are often hindered by lack of explainability and the need for labor-intensive manual transcriptions. To address these issues, this work proposes the reference-free, explainable ASR Inconsistency Score. We evaluate this method on pathological speech in Dutch, Spanish and English, and compare its performance to a reference-based Word Error Rate (WER) baseline. Our results demonstrate that the ASR Inconsistency Score achieves a high correlation with expert perceptual ratings, with performance closely matching, and in one case exceeding, a standard reference-based Word Error Rate (WER) baseline.

翻译：能够反映沟通中有意义变化的语音客观评估对于临床决策和可重复研究至关重要。现有的客观评估方法，特别是基于参考的方法，虽然能够捕捉清晰度的变化，但往往受限于缺乏可解释性以及需要耗费大量人力的手动转录。为解决这些问题，本研究提出了可解释的无参考ASR不一致性评分。我们在荷兰语、西班牙语和英语的病理语音上评估了该方法，并将其性能与基于参考的词错误率基线进行了比较。我们的结果表明，ASR不一致性评分与专家感知评分具有高度相关性，其性能与标准的基于参考的词错误率基线非常接近，并且在一种情况下超过了该基线。