@inproceedings{torgbi-etal-2025-adapting,
title = "Adapting Whisper for Regional Dialects: Enhancing Public Services for Vulnerable Populations in the {U}nited {K}ingdom",
author = "Torgbi, Melissa and
Clayman, Andrew and
Speight, Jordan J. and
Tayyar Madabushi, Harish",
editor = "Scherrer, Yves and
Jauhiainen, Tommi and
Ljube{\v{s}}i{\'c}, Nikola and
Nakov, Preslav and
Tiedemann, Jorg and
Zampieri, Marcos",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.vardial-1.4/",
pages = "29--38",
abstract = "We collect novel data in the public service domain to evaluate the capability of the state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models in capturing regional differences in accents in the United Kingdom (UK), specifically focusing on two accents from Scotland with distinct dialects. This study addresses real-world problems where biased ASR models can lead to miscommunication in public services, disadvantaging individuals with regional accents particularly those in vulnerable populations. We first examine the out-of-the-box performance of the Whisper large-v3 model on a baseline dataset and our data. We then explore the impact of fine-tuning Whisper on the performance in the two UK regions and investigate the effectiveness of existing model evaluation techniques for our real-world application through manual inspection of model errors. We observe that the Whisper model has a higher word error rate (WER) on our test datasets compared to the baseline data and fine-tuning on a given data improves performance on the test dataset with the same domain and accent. The fine-tuned models also appear to show improved performance when applied to the test data outside of the region it was trained on suggesting that fine-tuned models may be transferable within parts of the UK. Our manual analysis of model outputs reveals the benefits and drawbacks of using WER as an evaluation metric and fine-tuning to adapt to regional dialects."
}
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<abstract>We collect novel data in the public service domain to evaluate the capability of the state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models in capturing regional differences in accents in the United Kingdom (UK), specifically focusing on two accents from Scotland with distinct dialects. This study addresses real-world problems where biased ASR models can lead to miscommunication in public services, disadvantaging individuals with regional accents particularly those in vulnerable populations. We first examine the out-of-the-box performance of the Whisper large-v3 model on a baseline dataset and our data. We then explore the impact of fine-tuning Whisper on the performance in the two UK regions and investigate the effectiveness of existing model evaluation techniques for our real-world application through manual inspection of model errors. We observe that the Whisper model has a higher word error rate (WER) on our test datasets compared to the baseline data and fine-tuning on a given data improves performance on the test dataset with the same domain and accent. The fine-tuned models also appear to show improved performance when applied to the test data outside of the region it was trained on suggesting that fine-tuned models may be transferable within parts of the UK. Our manual analysis of model outputs reveals the benefits and drawbacks of using WER as an evaluation metric and fine-tuning to adapt to regional dialects.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Adapting Whisper for Regional Dialects: Enhancing Public Services for Vulnerable Populations in the United Kingdom
%A Torgbi, Melissa
%A Clayman, Andrew
%A Speight, Jordan J.
%A Tayyar Madabushi, Harish
%Y Scherrer, Yves
%Y Jauhiainen, Tommi
%Y Ljubešić, Nikola
%Y Nakov, Preslav
%Y Tiedemann, Jorg
%Y Zampieri, Marcos
%S Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects
%D 2025
%8 January
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Abu Dhabi, UAE
%F torgbi-etal-2025-adapting
%X We collect novel data in the public service domain to evaluate the capability of the state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models in capturing regional differences in accents in the United Kingdom (UK), specifically focusing on two accents from Scotland with distinct dialects. This study addresses real-world problems where biased ASR models can lead to miscommunication in public services, disadvantaging individuals with regional accents particularly those in vulnerable populations. We first examine the out-of-the-box performance of the Whisper large-v3 model on a baseline dataset and our data. We then explore the impact of fine-tuning Whisper on the performance in the two UK regions and investigate the effectiveness of existing model evaluation techniques for our real-world application through manual inspection of model errors. We observe that the Whisper model has a higher word error rate (WER) on our test datasets compared to the baseline data and fine-tuning on a given data improves performance on the test dataset with the same domain and accent. The fine-tuned models also appear to show improved performance when applied to the test data outside of the region it was trained on suggesting that fine-tuned models may be transferable within parts of the UK. Our manual analysis of model outputs reveals the benefits and drawbacks of using WER as an evaluation metric and fine-tuning to adapt to regional dialects.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.vardial-1.4/
%P 29-38
Markdown (Informal)
[Adapting Whisper for Regional Dialects: Enhancing Public Services for Vulnerable Populations in the United Kingdom](https://aclanthology.org/2025.vardial-1.4/) (Torgbi et al., VarDial 2025)
ACL