Anchoring Speech with Semantics: A Multimodal Adapter Mechanism for Automatic Speech Recognition in Low-Resource Languages

Kuan-Tang Huang, Cheng-Yeh Yang, Chien-Chun Wang, Hung-Shin Lee, Hsin-Min Wang, Berlin Chen


Abstract
Low-resource ASR remains difficult because scarce transcripts provide limited supervised evidence for target-side generation. To address this gap, we propose SAMA-ASR, a lightweight adapter mechanism that augments the decoder with semantic anchors from auxiliary translations and an acoustic anchor from speech; in principle, the mechanism can be applied to similar encoder–decoder multitask speech models. Through cross-modal adaptation, SAMA-ASR conditions decoder states on translation-derived semantic embeddings and a speech embedding, combining utterance-level meaning with speech-grounded evidence before token prediction. At evaluation time, these semantic anchors can be generated automatically by an upstream speech-to-text translator rather than supplied as oracle translations. Experiments on two 30-hour datasets covering the low-resource Sinitic varieties Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka show that SAMA-ASR improves over acoustic, prior prompt-based, and semantic-only translation-guided baselines and remains effective in practical automatic semantic-anchor settings; translator-capacity analyses show that useful semantic anchors can be produced by a compact ST model.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1380
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
31516–31531
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1380/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Kuan-Tang Huang, Cheng-Yeh Yang, Chien-Chun Wang, Hung-Shin Lee, Hsin-Min Wang, and Berlin Chen. 2026. Anchoring Speech with Semantics: A Multimodal Adapter Mechanism for Automatic Speech Recognition in Low-Resource Languages. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 31516–31531, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Anchoring Speech with Semantics: A Multimodal Adapter Mechanism for Automatic Speech Recognition in Low-Resource Languages (Huang et al., EMNLP 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1380.pdf