A Speech Resource for the Pontic Greek Dialect: Transcription Choices and Baseline ASR Evaluation

Rodanna Konstantinidou, Chara Tsoukala, Vivian Stamou, Voula Giouli, Stella Markantonatou


Abstract
Pontic Greek is a living but endangered Modern Greek dialect that lacks publicly available AI-oriented speech resources and ASR benchmarks. This work reports on the first systematic inference-only (zero-shot) ASR evaluation on authentic Pontic speech. Progress on Pontic ASR is hindered by two coupled challenges: the scarcity of transcribed speech data and the absence of a standardized orthography, which makes it difficult to create consistent reference transcriptions for evaluation. We address these challenges by releasing a new speech corpus of contemporary Pontic as spoken in Northern Greece, derived from natural conversations and provided with manual, utterance-level, time-aligned transcriptions. To reduce annotator bias and increase practical usability, we collect community evidence on written-form preferences via a small questionnaire and use the observed patterns to guide a consistent Greek-script transcription scheme. We use this corpus to perform inference-only (zero-shot) ASR evaluation, benchmarking four state-of-the-art pretrained speech recognition models under a unified evaluation protocol. Results show that zero-shot recognition remains challenging, establishing baseline figures and underscoring the need for dialect-specific data and adaptation.
Anthology ID:
2026.dialres-1.29
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP — A Resource Perspective
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca
Editors:
Antonis Anastasopoulos, Stella Markantonatou, Angela Ralli, Marcos Zampieri, Stavros Bompolas, Vivian Stamou
Venues:
DialRes | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
300–307
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-dialres-29
DOI:
10.63317/3rq2murx2626
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rodanna Konstantinidou, Chara Tsoukala, Vivian Stamou, Voula Giouli, and Stella Markantonatou. 2026. A Speech Resource for the Pontic Greek Dialect: Transcription Choices and Baseline ASR Evaluation. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP — A Resource Perspective, pages 300–307, Palma de Mallorca. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Speech Resource for the Pontic Greek Dialect: Transcription Choices and Baseline ASR Evaluation (Konstantinidou et al., DialRes 2026)
Copy Citation: