Transcription Policy as a Latent Variable: Activating Controllable Verbatim ASR with Word-Level Timing

Modern ASR models trained on heterogeneously annotated data treat transcription style (verbatim vs. intended) as an uncontrolled latent variable, causing measurable decoding instability, evaluation confounding (up to 60% of reported WER attributable to style mismatch), and unreliable word-level timi...