Phonologically-aware Automatic Speech Recognition Evaluation of Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Basque Dialects

Christoforos Souganidis, Asier Herranz, Ibon Saratxaga, Eva Navas, Inma Hernaez


Abstract
Automatic speech recognition models are typically trained with data of standard languages. However, their performance degrades when dealing with non-standard dialectal speech. In this paper, we present the first evaluation of an automatic speech recognition system for Basque, a low-resource language, based on spontaneous broadcast speech with high representation of dialectal speech. It relies on a 140-h manually annotated propietary corpus of television programs broadcast by Basque Radio Television, including dialect-level labels, as well as standardized and pseudo-phonetic transcriptions. We find that recognition performance significantly degrades for dialectal compared to standard speech, for all dialects present in our corpus. Subsequently, we provide a quantitative analysis of phonological phenomena based on single-word substitution errors, and identify 52 recurrent phenomena, grouped into sound deletions, epentheses, and substitutions. We further show a modest but statistically significant correlation between the number of phonological phenomena in an utterance and its recognition error rate. Our findings highlight the limitations of dialect-agnostic evaluation and motivate linguistically informed, dialect-aware strategies for automatic speech recognition in low-resource and typologically diverse languages.
Anthology ID:
2026.dialres-1.5
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:
48–57
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-dialres-05
DOI:
10.63317/262fznwr54us
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christoforos Souganidis, Asier Herranz, Ibon Saratxaga, Eva Navas, and Inma Hernaez. 2026. Phonologically-aware Automatic Speech Recognition Evaluation of Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Basque Dialects. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP — A Resource Perspective, pages 48–57, Palma de Mallorca. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Phonologically-aware Automatic Speech Recognition Evaluation of Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Basque Dialects (Souganidis et al., DialRes 2026)
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