BlasBench: An Open Benchmark for Irish Speech Recognition
Existing multilingual benchmarks include Irish among dozens of languages but apply no Irish-aware text normalisation, leaving reliable and reproducible ASR comparison impossible. We introduce BlasBench, an open evaluation harness that provides a standalone Irish-aware normaliser preserving fadas, lenition, and eclipsis; a reproducible scoring harness and per-utterance predictions released for all evaluated runs. We pilot this by benchmarking 12 systems across four architecture families on Common Voice ga-IE and FLEURS ga-IE. All Whisper variants exceed 100% WER through insertion-driven hallucination. Microsoft Azure reaches 22.2% WER on Common Voice and 57.5% on FLEURS; the best open mode...
| Authors | Jyoutir Raj, John Conway |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 12 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 April 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.