# Can Large Language Models Reliably Correct Errors in Low-Resource ASR? A Contamination-Aware Case Study on West Frisian

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19711 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19711/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [NLP Evaluation in trouble: On the Need to Measure LLM Data Contamination for each Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18018/) (2023)
- [Leak, Cheat, Repeat: Data Contamination and Evaluation Malpractices in Closed-Source LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03927/) (2024)
- [Benchmark Data Contamination of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04244/) (2024)
- [Generative Speech Recognition Error Correction with Large Language Models and Task-Activating Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15649/) (2023)
- [Can Generative Large Language Models Perform ASR Error Correction?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04172/) (2023)
- [An Open Source Data Contamination Report for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17589/) (2023)
- [HyPoradise: An Open Baseline for Generative Speech Recognition with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15701/) (2023)
- [Making More of Little Data: Improving Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognition Using Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10951/) (2023)
- [ASR Error Correction using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09554/) (2024)
- [Towards interfacing large language models with ASR systems using confidence measures and prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21414/) (2024)
- [LLM-based Generative Error Correction for Rare Words with Synthetic Data and Phonetic Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17410/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models based ASR Error Correction for Child Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16212/) (2025)
- [Effects of Speaker Count, Duration, and Accent Diversity on Zero-Shot Accent Robustness in Low-Resource ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04364/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has improved substantially in recent years, yet performance remains limited for low-resource languages. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for improving ASR through generative error correction (GER), but their effectiveness in low-resource settings remains underexplored. In addition, it remains unclear to what extent data contamination influences the reported improvements in LLM-based GER. This study investigates LLM-based GER for low-resource Frisian. In addition to a public corpus, we construct and use a Frisian offline dataset with non-public texts for evaluation to control for potential data contamination. Results show that GER improves ASR performance in most settings, with the best GPT-5.1 results surpassing oracle WERs. Comparable gains on the offline dataset indicate that improvements reflect true correction ability. We further provide a detailed error analysis revealing model correction patterns.
