@inproceedings{kumar-etal-2026-post,
    title = "Post-{ASR} Correction in {H}indi: Comparing Language Models and Large Language Models in Low-Resource Scenarios",
    author = "Kumar, Rishabh  and
      Krishna, Amrith  and
      Ramakrishnan, Ganesh  and
      Jyothi, Preethi",
    editor = "Demberg, Vera  and
      Inui, Kentaro  and
      Marquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the {E}uropean Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-short.45/",
    pages = "636--645",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-381-4",
    abstract = "Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for low-resource languages like Hindi often produce erroneous transcripts due to limited annotated data and linguistic complexity. **Post-ASR correction** using language models (LMs) and large language models (LLMs) offers a promising approach to improve transcription quality. In this work, we compare fine-tuned LMs (mT5, ByT5), fine-tuned LLMs (Nanda 10B), and instruction-tuned LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, LLaMA variants) for post-ASR correction in Hindi. Our findings reveal that **smaller, fine-tuned models** consistently **outperform larger LLMs** in both fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) settings. We observe a **U-shaped inverse scaling** trend under zero-shot ICL, where mid-sized LLMs degrade performance before marginal recovery at extreme scales, yet still fall short of fine-tuned models. **ByT5 is more effective for character-level corrections** such as transliteration and word segmentation, while **mT5 handles broader semantic inconsistencies**. We also identify performance drops in out-of-domain settings and propose **mitigation strategies** to preserve domain fidelity. In particular, we observe similar trends in **Marathi and Telugu**, indicating the broader applicability of our findings across low-resource Indian languages."
}