Azmol Hossain


2025

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Are ASR foundation models generalized enough to capture features of regional dialects for low-resource languages?
Tawsif Tashwar Dipto | Azmol Hossain | Rubayet Sabbir Faruque | Md. Rezuwan Hassan | Kanij Fatema | Tanmoy Shome | Ruwad Naswan | Md.Foriduzzaman Zihad | Mohaymen Ul Anam | Nazia Tasnim | Hasan Mahmud | Md Kamrul Hasan | Md. Mehedi Hasan Shawon | Farig Sadeque | Tahsin Reasat
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Conventional research on speech recognition modeling relies on the canonical form for most low-resource languages while automatic speech recognition (ASR) for regional dialects is treated as a fine-tuning task. To investigate the effects of dialectal variations on ASR we develop a 78-hour annotated Bengali Speech-to-Text (STT) corpus named Ben-10. Investigation from linguistic and data-driven perspectives shows that speech foundation models struggle heavily in regional dialect ASR, both in zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We observe that all deep learning methods struggle to model speech data under dialectal variations, but dialect specific model training alleviates the issue. Our dataset also serves as a out-of-distribution (OOD) resource for ASR modeling under constrained resources in ASR algorithms. The dataset and code developed for this project are publicly available.