mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Dialect Matters: Cross-Lingual ASR Transfer for Low-Resource Indic Language Varieties

arXiv 2601.04373 ↗First posted 7 Jan 2026cs.CLcited by 2

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

We conduct an empirical study of cross-lingual transfer using spontaneous, noisy, and code-mixed speech across a wide range of Indic dialects and language varieties. Our results indicate that although ASR performance is generally improved with reduced phylogenetic distance between languages, this factor alone does not fully explain performance in dialectal settings. Often, fine-tuning on smaller amounts of dialectal data yields performance comparable to fine-tuning on larger amounts of phylogenetically-related, high-resource standardized languages. We also present a case study on Garhwali, a low-resource Pahari language variety, and evaluate multiple contemporary ASR models. Finally, we analyze transcription errors to examine bias toward pre-training languages, providing additional insight into challenges faced by ASR systems on dialectal and non-standardized speech.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 10 of its 23 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2026.

Builds on

10 of 23 references.

References · 10

  1. 2022Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervisioncited by 4,057
  2. 2020wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representationscited by 3,905
  3. 2021HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Unitscited by 2,342
  4. 2021XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scalecited by 601
  5. 2021W2v-BERT: Combining Contrastive Learning and Masked Language Modeling for Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Trainingcited by 347
  6. 2021Multilingual and code-switching ASR challenges for low resource Indian languagescited by 53
  7. 2023Quantifying the Dialect Gap and its Correlates Across Languagescited by 33
  8. 2022Towards Building Text-To-Speech Systems for the Next Billion Userscited by 27
  9. 2022Vakyansh: ASR Toolkit for Low Resource Indic languagescited by 7
  10. 2024Language Complexity and Speech Recognition Accuracy: Orthographic Complexity Hurts, Phonological Complexity Doesn'tcited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

  1. 2026Seeds Before Objectives: Rethinking Evaluation for Low-Resource Garhwali ASRcited by 1
  2. 2026From Sinhala to Dhivehi: Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Speech Recognitioncited by 0