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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04814 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04814/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11856/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13979/) (2020)
- [MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01454/) (2021)
- [Beto, Bentz, Becas: The Surprising Cross-Lingual Effectiveness of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09077/) (2019)
- [Are All Languages Created Equal in Multilingual BERT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09093/) (2020)
- [Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02353/) (2020)
- [Choosing Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12688/) (2019)
- [Masakhane -- Machine Translation For Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11529/) (2020)
- [LoRA-Whisper: Parameter-Efficient and Extensible Multilingual ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06619/) (2024)
- [Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer language selection using linguistic similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13720/) (2023)
- [Comparison of Multilingual Self-Supervised and Weakly-Supervised Speech Pre-Training for Adaptation to Unseen Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12606/) (2023)
- [Adapting Multilingual Speech Representation Model for a New, Underresourced Language through Multilingual Fine-tuning and Continued Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07295/) (2023)
- [Predicting positive transfer for improved low-resource speech recognition using acoustic pseudo-tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02302/) (2024)
- [WAXAL: A Large-Scale Multilingual African Language Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02734/) (2026)
- [Building low-resource African language corpora: A case study of Kidawida, Kalenjin and Dholuo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11003/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale. A promising direction is to leverage the linguistic relatedness between a low-resource target language and languages previously seen by a model to reduce the volume of target-language data needed for effective adaptation. Although this approach has proven reliable for text-based models, its effectiveness in the speech domain remains contested. We employ a systematic controlled experimental design spanning six factors, two Africa-centric corpora, and four large ASR models, sequentially adapting on a related auxiliary language followed by the target to isolate whether linguistic relatedness reliably predicts cross-lingual transfer gains across these conditions. In every setting, pre-adaptation on related auxiliary languages yields no practically meaningful improvements once as little as one hour of target-language data is available, suggesting that relatedness alone may not reliably predict transfer gains in large multilingual ASR, or constitute an effective strategy for extending such models to low-resource languages.