Hung-Shin Lee


2026

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.
Taiwanese Hakka is a low-resource, endangered language that poses significant challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR), including high dialectal variability and the presence of two distinct writing systems (Hanzi and Pinyin). Traditional ASR models often encounter difficulties in this context, as they tend to conflate essential linguistic content with dialect-specific variations across both phonological and lexical dimensions. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework grounded in the Recurrent Neural Network Transducers (RNN-T). Central to our approach is the introduction of dialect-aware modeling strategies designed to disentangle dialectal ”style” from linguistic ”content”, which enhances the model’s capacity to learn robust and generalized representations. Additionally, the framework employs parameter-efficient prediction networks to concurrently model ASR (Hanzi and Pinyin). We demonstrate that these tasks create a powerful synergy, wherein the cross-script objective serves as a mutual regularizer to improve the primary ASR tasks. Experiments conducted on the HAT corpus reveal that our model achieves 57.00% and 40.41% relative error rate reduction on Hanzi and Pinyin ASR, respectively. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic investigation into the impact of Hakka dialectal variations on ASR and the first single model capable of jointly addressing these tasks.

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