LCMA-SRT: Language-Conditional Mixture-of-Experts Adapters for Joint Multilingual Speech Recognition and Translation

Nanjie Li, Xiaoyong Guo, Hao Huang, Xu Haihua, Wei Shi


Abstract
Neural transducers offer an alignment-free framework for speech-to-text modeling, and hierarchical transducer architectures further improve multilingual joint automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST) by stacking a translation-focused encoder on top of an ASR encoder. However, extending hierarchical transducers to multilingual many-to-many settings remains challenging: fully shared models often suffer from negative transfer and unstable target-language generation, while training separate models for each direction is computationally prohibitive. We propose LCMA-SRT (Language-Conditional Mixture-of-Experts Adapters for Speech Recognition and Translation), which augments a hierarchical transducer with language-conditional Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) adapters. A source-conditioned MoE adapter (SRC-MoE) uses source-language embeddings to reduce cross-language interference and improve multilingual ASR. A target-conditioned MoE adapter (TGT-MoE) uses the desired target language to reduce cross-target interference and stabilize target-language generation in many-to-many ST. Experiments on Europarl-ST (9 languages, 72 directions) show that LCMA-SRT improves both ASR and ST within a single joint model, reducing average WER and improving BLEU and COMET over strong hierarchical transducer baselines. We release our code and models at https://github.com/linanjie0820/LCMA-SRT.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1634
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
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ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
35363–35377
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1634/
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Cite (ACL):
Nanjie Li, Xiaoyong Guo, Hao Huang, Xu Haihua, and Wei Shi. 2026. LCMA-SRT: Language-Conditional Mixture-of-Experts Adapters for Joint Multilingual Speech Recognition and Translation. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 35363–35377, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LCMA-SRT: Language-Conditional Mixture-of-Experts Adapters for Joint Multilingual Speech Recognition and Translation (Li et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1634.pdf
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