TG-ASR: Translation-Guided Learning with Parallel Gated Cross Attention for Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognition

ChengYeh Yang, Chien-Chun Wang, Li-Wei Chen, Hung-Shin Lee, Hsin-Min Wang, Berlin Chen


Abstract
Low-resource automatic speech recognition remains a critical challenge due to the scarcity of transcribed data for many languages.Taiwanese Hokkien exemplifies this problem as, although extensive speech content exists in television dramas and online videos, transcriptions are scarce and most available subtitles are in Mandarin.To address this gap, this paper presents TG-ASR for Taiwanese drama speech recognition, a translation-guided ASR framework that leverages multilingual translation embeddings to enhance recognition in low-resource conditions.The framework centers on the parallel gated cross-attention (PGCA) mechanism, which adaptively integrates embeddings from multiple auxiliary languages into the ASR decoder.This mechanism enables robust cross-linguistic semantic guidance while maintaining stable optimization and avoiding interference between languages.To support future research, we release YT-THDC, a 30-hour corpus of Taiwanese drama speech with aligned Mandarin subtitles and manually verified Taiwanese transcriptions.Extensive experiments and analysis identify which auxiliary languages most effectively improve Taiwanese ASR, achieving a 13.51% relative reduction in character error rate and demonstrating the potential of translation-guided learning for underrepresented languages in real-world scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.790
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
10071–10081
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.790/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
ChengYeh Yang, Chien-Chun Wang, Li-Wei Chen, Hung-Shin Lee, Hsin-Min Wang, and Berlin Chen. 2026. TG-ASR: Translation-Guided Learning with Parallel Gated Cross Attention for Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognition. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:10071–10081.
Cite (Informal):
TG-ASR: Translation-Guided Learning with Parallel Gated Cross Attention for Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognition (Yang et al., LREC 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.790.pdf