README.md

---
license: apache-2.0
language:
- nl
base_model: openai/whisper-large-v3
tags:
- automatic-speech-recognition
- whisper
- dutch
- speech
- audio
- synthetic-data
- asr
- hf-asr-leaderboard
datasets:
- mozilla-foundation/common_voice_17_0
- yuriyvnv/synthetic_transcript_nl
model-index:
- name: whisper-large-v3-high-mixed-nl
  results:
  - task:
      type: automatic-speech-recognition
      name: Automatic Speech Recognition
    dataset:
      name: Common Voice 17.0 (Dutch)
      type: mozilla-foundation/common_voice_17_0
      config: nl
      split: test
    metrics:
    - type: wer
      value: 4.43
      name: Test WER
  - task:
      type: automatic-speech-recognition
      name: Automatic Speech Recognition
    dataset:
      name: Multilingual LibriSpeech (Dutch)
      type: facebook/multilingual_librispeech
      config: dutch
      split: test
    metrics:
    - type: wer
      value: 20.29
      name: Test WER (MLS)
pipeline_tag: automatic-speech-recognition
library_name: transformers
---

# Whisper-Large-v3 Dutch - High-Quality Filtered Synthetic Data

This model is a fine-tuned version of [openai/whisper-large-v3](https://huggingface.co/openai/whisper-large-v3) for Dutch automatic speech recognition (ASR). It was trained on Common Voice 17.0 Dutch combined with **WAVe-filtered high-quality synthetic speech data only** using a strict threshold (q ≥ 0.8).

## Introduction

### How the Data Was Created

The training data combines real speech from Common Voice 17.0 with synthetic speech generated through a two-stage pipeline:

1. **Transcript Generation**: We used GPT-4o-mini to generate Dutch transcripts that match the word count distribution observed in Common Voice, ensuring realistic utterance lengths and diverse linguistic content.

2. **Speech Synthesis**: Each transcript was converted to audio using OpenAI's TTS-1 model with 9 different voice variants (alloy, ash, coral, echo, fable, nova, onyx, sage, shimmer), producing 34,898 synthetic samples.

3. **Quality Filtering with WAVe**: Raw synthetic speech often contains defects such as mispronunciations, omitted words, or prosodic anomalies. To address this, we applied **WAVe (Word-Aligned Verification)**, a model that assesses audio-text alignment at the word level rather than the sentence level. WAVe uses multi-head attention to align each word to its corresponding audio frames and assigns per-word confidence scores via a GLU-based scorer. For this model, only samples scoring above the strict threshold (q ≥ 0.8) were retained, resulting in 10,555 high-quality synthetic samples.

### How the Model Was Created

The model was fine-tuned from `openai/whisper-large-v3` using the Hugging Face Transformers library with the following approach:

1. **Mixed Training**: Combined 34,952 real speech samples from Common Voice 17.0 Dutch with 10,555 strictly WAVe-filtered high-quality synthetic samples (45,507 total).

2. **Optimization**: Trained for 5 epochs with a learning rate of 5e-6, global batch size of 256, and BF16 precision on an NVIDIA H200 GPU.

3. **Checkpoint Selection**: The best checkpoint was selected based on validation loss, occurring at step 350 with a validation loss of 0.0552.

This high-quality filtering approach achieves **35% reduction in training steps** compared to using all synthetic data, while maintaining excellent ASR performance.

## Model Details

| Property | Value |
|----------|-------|
| **Base Model** | openai/whisper-large-v3 |
| **Language** | Dutch (nl) |
| **Task** | Automatic Speech Recognition (transcribe) |
| **Parameters** | 1550M |
| **Training Data** | Common Voice 17.0 + High-Quality Synthetic (q ≥ 0.8) |
| **Total Training Samples** | 45,507 |
| **Sampling Rate** | 16kHz |

## Evaluation Results

### This Model (whisper-large-v3-high-mixed-nl)

| Metric | Value |
|--------|-------|
| **Validation Loss** | 0.0520 |
| **Validation WER** | 3.57% |
| **Test WER (Common Voice)** | 4.43% |
| **Test WER (MLS)** | 20.29% |
| **Best Checkpoint** | Step 350 |
| **Max Training Steps** | 890 |

### Comparison with Other Training Configurations (Whisper-Large-v3 Dutch)

| Training Data | Max Steps | Val Loss | Val WER | Test WER (CV) | Test WER (MLS) |
|---------------|-----------|----------|---------|---------------|----------------|
| Common Voice Only | 680 | 0.0549 | 3.56% | 4.39% | 22.43% |
| **High-Quality Filtered + CV** | **890** | **0.0520** | **3.57%** | **4.43%** | **20.29%** |
| Mid-High Quality Filtered + CV | 1,270 | 0.0570 | 3.63% | 4.48% | 17.25% |
| All Synthetic + CV (Unfiltered) | 1,365 | 0.0560 | 3.61% | 4.44% | 17.02% |

### Key Performance Highlights

- **Most efficient training**: Only 890 max steps (35% fewer than unfiltered)
- **Best validation loss** (0.0520) among all Whisper-Large-v3 Dutch configurations
- **Competitive in-domain performance**: 4.43% Test WER on Common Voice
- **9.5% relative improvement** on MLS benchmark vs baseline (20.29% vs 22.43%)
- **Best quality-to-compute ratio**: Strong results with only top-tier synthetic data (30.2%)

## Training Data

### Dataset Composition

| Source | Samples | Description |
|--------|---------|-------------|
| [Common Voice 17.0 Dutch](https://huggingface.co/datasets/mozilla-foundation/common_voice_17_0) | 34,952 | Real speech from Mozilla's crowdsourced dataset |
| [Synthetic Transcript NL](https://huggingface.co/datasets/yuriyvnv/synthetic_transcript_nl) (q ≥ 0.8) | 10,555 | Strictly WAVe-filtered TTS audio (high quality only) |
| **Total** | **45,507** | |

### Synthetic Data Generation Pipeline

The synthetic dataset ([yuriyvnv/synthetic_transcript_nl](https://huggingface.co/datasets/yuriyvnv/synthetic_transcript_nl)) was generated using:

1. **Transcript Generation**: GPT-4o-mini, matching Common Voice word count distribution
2. **Speech Synthesis**: OpenAI TTS-1 model with 9 voice variants (alloy, ash, coral, echo, fable, nova, onyx, sage, shimmer)
3. **Quality Filtering**: WAVe model with strict threshold q ≥ 0.8 (high quality only)

### WAVe Quality Distribution (Dutch Synthetic Data)

| Quality Level | Samples | Percentage | Used in This Model |
|--------------|---------|------------|-------------------|
| High (q ≥ 0.8) | 10,555 | 30.2% | ✓ |
| Medium (0.5 ≤ q < 0.8) | 19,627 | 56.2% | ✗ |
| Low (q < 0.5) | 4,716 | 13.5% | ✗ |

This strict threshold retains only the top 30.2% of synthetic samples, prioritizing quality over quantity for maximum training efficiency.

## Training Procedure

### Hyperparameters

| Parameter | Value |
|-----------|-------|
| Learning Rate | 5e-6 |
| Batch Size (Global) | 256 |
| Warmup Steps | 200 |
| Max Epochs | 5 |
| Precision | BF16 |
| Optimizer | AdamW (fused) |
| Eval Steps | 50 |
| Metric for Best Model | eval_loss |

### Training Infrastructure

- **GPU**: NVIDIA H200 (140GB VRAM)
- **Operating System**: Ubuntu 22.04
- **Framework**: Hugging Face Transformers

### Training Curve

```
Step  100: val_loss = 0.0588
Step  200: val_loss = 0.0562
Step  250: val_loss = 0.0561
Step  350: val_loss = 0.0552 ← Best checkpoint
Step  500: val_loss = 0.0601
Step  650: val_loss = 0.0627
Step  850: val_loss = 0.0680
```

## Usage

### Transcription Pipeline

```python
from transformers import pipeline

transcriber = pipeline(
    "automatic-speech-recognition",
    model="yuriyvnv/whisper-large-v3-high-mixed-nl",
    device="cuda"
)

result = transcriber("path/to/dutch_audio.wav")
print(result["text"])
```

### Direct Model Usage

```python
from transformers import WhisperProcessor, WhisperForConditionalGeneration
import librosa

processor = WhisperProcessor.from_pretrained("yuriyvnv/whisper-large-v3-high-mixed-nl")
model = WhisperForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("yuriyvnv/whisper-large-v3-high-mixed-nl")
model.to("cuda")

audio, sr = librosa.load("path/to/dutch_audio.wav", sr=16000)
input_features = processor(audio, sampling_rate=16000, return_tensors="pt").input_features.to("cuda")

predicted_ids = model.generate(input_features)
transcription = processor.batch_decode(predicted_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)[0]
print(transcription)
```

### Specifying Language

```python
model.generation_config.language = "nl"
model.generation_config.task = "transcribe"
```

## Methodology

This model leverages **WAVe (Word-Aligned Verification)**, a word-level quality assessment method for filtering synthetic speech data. Unlike sentence-level filtering approaches, WAVe:

- Aligns each word to its corresponding audio frames using multi-head attention
- Assigns per-word confidence scores via a GLU-based scorer
- Detects localized synthesis errors (mispronunciations, omitted words, prosodic anomalies)
- Achieves **6.5% improvement** over sentence-level filtering methods

The strict threshold (q ≥ 0.8) retains only the top 30.2% of synthetic samples, prioritizing quality over quantity for maximum training efficiency.

## When to Use This Model

This model is ideal when:
- **Compute resources are limited**: 35% fewer training steps than unfiltered approaches
- **Quick fine-tuning is needed**: Smaller dataset (45,507 samples) enables faster iteration
- **Best validation performance required**: Achieves lowest validation loss (0.0520)
- **Quality over quantity**: Only top-tier synthetic data (30.2%) for clean training signal

Consider other variants based on your needs:
- [whisper-large-v3-mixed-cv-nl](https://huggingface.co/yuriyvnv/whisper-large-v3-mixed-cv-nl): Better cross-domain performance with more data
- [whisper-large-v3-cv-fully-synthetic-nl](https://huggingface.co/yuriyvnv/whisper-large-v3-cv-fully-synthetic-nl): Best cross-domain generalization (17.02% MLS)

## Limitations

- **Domain specificity**: Optimized for general Dutch; may underperform on technical domains
- **Acoustic conditions**: Trained on clean speech; noise robustness not guaranteed
- **Dialect coverage**: Performance may vary across Dutch regional variants

## Citation

```bibtex
@article{perezhohin2024enhancing,
  title={Enhancing Automatic Speech Recognition: Effects of Semantic Audio Filtering on Models Performance},
  author={Perezhohin, Yuriy and Santos, Tiago and Costa, Victor and Peres, Fernando and Castelli, Mauro},
  journal={IEEE Access},
  year={2024},
  publisher={IEEE}
}
```

## References

- **Base Model**: [openai/whisper-large-v3](https://huggingface.co/openai/whisper-large-v3)
- **Training Data (Real)**: [mozilla-foundation/common_voice_17_0](https://huggingface.co/datasets/mozilla-foundation/common_voice_17_0)
- **Training Data (Synthetic)**: [yuriyvnv/synthetic_transcript_nl](https://huggingface.co/datasets/yuriyvnv/synthetic_transcript_nl)
- **Whisper Paper**: [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04356)
- **IEEE Access Paper**: [Enhancing ASR with Semantic Audio Filtering](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10720758)

## License

Apache 2.0