arXiv:2607. 23808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce Indic DiarBench, a speaker diarization and ASR benchmark dataset spanning all 22 scheduled languages of India.
By Deovrat Mehendale, Aditya Mehndiratta, Dhruv Rathi, Kaushal Bhogale, Mitesh M. Khapra
arXiv:2606. 19640v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI and large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools to address global mental health challenges.
By Yunkai Xu, Saeed Abdullah
The paper introduces a synthetic Bengali speech dataset tailored for telecom customer‑care applications, comprising 10,000 audio‑text pairs (≈26.82 hours) with predefined train, validation, and test splits. The data were generated using OmniVoice voice‑cloning, and include both original and normalized transcripts for ASR/STT use. Automatic intelligibility evaluation with a fine‑tuned Whisper model shows an average WER of 2.54% and CER of 0.59%, indicating strong text‑audio consistency, while the authors note limitations of synthetic speech and STT‑based evaluation.
By Kawshik Kumar Paul, Md. Nafiul Alam Fuji
arXiv:2609.24199v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Evaluation benchmarks for Indian language automatic speech recognition (ASR) suffer from two systematic biases: optimistic scores from clean, controlle...
By Kaushal Santosh Bhogale, Srija Anand, Sadakopa Ramakrishnan Thothathiri, Tahir Javed, Sshubam Verma, Mitesh M. Khapra
VākQA is a newly introduced benchmark for Telugu spoken factoid question answering, comprising 2,001 question‑answer pairs across six domains, 2.53 hours of speech audio, bilingual transcriptions, and human‑verified reference answers. The study validates automatic evaluation methods against human judgments, finding that Gemini‑as‑a‑judge best approximates human ratings but is inconsistently strict, while open‑weight judges tend to penalize correct Telugu answers that differ in surface form. Using this validated setup, the authors benchmark proprietary and open‑weight models, highlighting challenges such as cultural specificity loss in translation, phonetic confusions from speech input, and compounded errors from cascaded ASR‑MT pipelines.
The paper titled "Safety Alignment Illusion: The Cross-Lingual Safety Gap in LLMs" highlights that current safety alignment training for large language models is predominantly English-centric, leading to failures in non‑English languages. It introduces INCLUDE, a multilingual benchmark with 2,604 prompts in six languages (English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and Hinglish) to measure Indian‑centric socio‑cultural biases. Evaluation of ten open‑ and closed‑source LLMs shows that Bengali models exhibit the highest bias scores among open‑source models, while English shows the lowest bias in open‑source but the highest in closed‑source models.
By Namya Bhatnagar
VákQA is a new Telugu spoken factoid question answering benchmark comprising 2,001 question‑answer pairs across six domains, 2.53 hours of speech audio, bilingual transcriptions, and human‑verified reference answers. The study validates automatic evaluation methods against human judgments, finding that Gemini-as-a-judge best approximates human ratings but is unevenly strict, while open‑weight judges tend to penalize correct Telugu answers that differ in surface form. Using this validated setup, the authors benchmark proprietary and open‑weight models, highlighting challenges such as cultural specificity lost in translation, phonetic confusions from speech input, and cascading ASR‑MT errors.
By Bhavana Akkiraju, Ravi Sastry Kolluru, Sri Charan D, Srihari Bandarupalli, Santosh Kesiraju, Anil Vuppala
arXiv:2606. 26144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speaker diarization, the task of determining "who spoke when" in a multi-speaker recording, is a critical component in applications such as meeting transcription, accessibility tools, and multilingual information retrieval.
By Samip Neupane, Sandesh Pokhrel, Sandesh Pyakurel, Basanta Joshi
This study evaluates automatic speech recognition (ASR) for adolescent health communication in Twi, Dagbani, and Ewe by benchmarking five ASR systems on a Bible corpus and a domain-specific ASRH dataset, then performing supervised domain adaptation with a fine‑tuned Qwen3-ASR-0.6B model. Fine‑tuning significantly lowered word and character error rates, especially for Ewe, and the adapted model was deployed in the KasaHealth voice‑first application, which received high user approval and highlighted remaining domain gaps. The work demonstrates that in‑domain data, rather than model size or computational resources, is the primary limitation for effective ASR in these languages.
By Stephen E. Moore, Akwasi Asare, Mich-Seth Owusu, Paul Azunre, Joel Budu, Lawrence A. Adu-Gyamfi
arXiv:2609.14542v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Neyshekar is presented as an open Persian read-speech corpus designed for coverage of both formal and informal language, named entities, and longer utt...
By Ahmad Amirivojdan, Farzad Nadiri, Abolfazl Alizadeh, Shaghayegh Yaraghi
arXiv:2608. 12327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual pretrained models nominally support Nepali, yet no controlled benchmark has compared them under a single fine-tuning protocol.
By Suman Paudel, Sarbin Sayami
arXiv:2602.13047v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Conversational speech reveals early signs of cognitive decline, including dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). AI models show promise for...
By Madhurananda Pahar, Caitlin Illingworth, Dorota Braun, Bahman Mirheidari, Lise Sproson, Daniel Blackburn, Heidi Christensen