arXiv Computation and Language

Evaluating Tibetan Speech Recognition Across Dialects and Adaptation Regimes: A Multi-Granularity Analysis

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Error Rate is Not Enough: Costs of Augmentation in Low-Resource ASR

The paper examines how different data‑augmentation techniques affect low‑resource automatic speech recognition beyond overall error rates. It compares speed perturbation, SpecAugment, and two text‑based audio synthesis methods across four low‑resource languages and English, analyzing phoneme‑level errors. The study finds that SpecAugment improves aggregate performance but increases tone and palatalization errors, while text‑based methods introduce consonant insertions; when combined, each method mitigates the other's weaknesses, yielding superadditive gains that diminish as data size grows to 100 hours.

By Katsumi Ibaraki, David Chiang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Closing the Quality Gap in Low-Resource Text-to-Speech: LoRA Fine-Tuning of VoxCPM2 for Khmer and Korean

The paper investigates how to close the quality gap in low‑resource text‑to‑speech for Khmer and Korean using the VoxCPM2 model. By training a single low‑rank adaptation (LoRA) adapter on a shared 25.5‑hour corpus, the authors improve Khmer’s mean opinion score from 3.85 to 4.23 with a rank‑64 adapter, while Korean shows no significant gain. The study highlights that adaptation benefits mainly when the base model is weak and that training loss does not always align with human ratings.

By Phannet Pov, Hyun Woo Park, Voneat Pen, Sovandara Chhoun, Wan-Sup Cho, Saksonita Khoeurn
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

Child ASR Adaptation with Adult Retention: An Empirical Study

The study investigates how to adapt automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to child speech while preserving adult performance, focusing on Arabic and English data. It compares full fine‑tuning, LoRA, and post‑hoc weight‑space merging across encoder–decoder, encoder–CTC, and AudioLLM‑based ASR systems, using child and adult benchmarks. Results indicate that child adaptation is essential, especially for non‑native speakers, but direct adaptation can degrade adult accuracy; bilingual adaptation and weight‑space merging techniques help balance the trade‑off, with encoder–decoder fine‑tuning still yielding the best raw WER for bilingual models.

By Houssam Eddine-Othman Lachemat, Shammur Absar Chowdhury
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Evaluating the Effect of Linguistic Relatedness on Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv:2607. 04814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale.

By Andrei Florian, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Hope Kerubo Ombaba, Xiaoyu Cui, Boniface Mwau, Biatus Maina Kamau, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Christiane Fellbaum, Happy Buzaaba
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

SpeakPay: Domain-Adaptive LoRA Fine-Tuning of Whisper for Low-Resource Nepali Financial Speech Recognition

SpeakPay is a voice‑first digital wallet designed to make mobile payment apps in Nepal accessible to visually impaired users. The paper introduces NepFinSpeech‑403, a 403‑utterance Nepali financial voice command dataset, and demonstrates that fine‑tuning Whisper large‑v2 with LoRA reduces the Word Error Rate from 129.95% to 42.58% and improves Devanagari numeral recognition from 0.0% to 73.9%. Domain adaptation also boosts the Transaction Success Rate from 1.67% to 33.33%, with as few as 100 domain‑specific utterances halving the zero‑shot WER.

By Biraj Subedi