CUET_InferX@DravidianLangTech 2026: Shared Task on Dialect Based Speech Recognition and Classification in Tamil

Md. Ashraful Islam Semon, Jihadul Islam, Ratnajit Dhar, Hasan Murad


Abstract
Tamil has a lot of internal variability, including the way it is used in casual conversations, code mixing, and phonetic differences in the way it is spoken in different regions, making it quite difficult to transcribe the spoken word and classify the dialects. In order to address these challenges, our paper presents the system developed by the CUET_InferX team for the Shared Task on Dialect Based Speech Recognition and Classification in Tamil, which was part of DravidianLangTech@ACL 2026. For Subtask 2 (ASR), our proposed system is based on a dual-architecture design that incorporates a fine-tuned Whisper-large-v3 model with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and a Wav2Vec2 XLSR-53 model, topped with a KenLM statistical language model for n-gram phonetic correction. Our ASR system resulted in a Word Error Rate (WER) of 0.54, which earned us 2nd position for Subtask 2. For Subtask 1 (Speech-Based Dialect Classification), our proposed system is based on a text-based weighted ensemble of IndicBERT, MuRIL, XLM-RoBERTa, and TamilBERT models, which is completely dependent on our ASR system’s transcription outputs. Our proposed system achieved a Macro F1 score of 0.22, which earned us 9th position for Subtask 1.
Anthology ID:
2026.dravidianlangtech-1.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
Underline (Virtual)
Editors:
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Ruba Priyadharshini, Anand Kumar Madasamy, Sajeetha Thavareesan, Saranya Rajiakodi, Subalalitha Navaneethakrishnan, Dhivya Chinnappa, Balasubramanian Palani, Malliga Subramanian, Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel, Ratnavel Rajalakshmi
Venues:
DravidianLangTech | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
201–206
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.dravidianlangtech-1.27/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Md. Ashraful Islam Semon, Jihadul Islam, Ratnajit Dhar, and Hasan Murad. 2026. CUET_InferX@DravidianLangTech 2026: Shared Task on Dialect Based Speech Recognition and Classification in Tamil. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages, pages 201–206, Underline (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CUET_InferX@DravidianLangTech 2026: Shared Task on Dialect Based Speech Recognition and Classification in Tamil (Semon et al., DravidianLangTech 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.dravidianlangtech-1.27.pdf