Toward Conversational Hungarian Speech Recognition: Introducing the BEA-Large and BEA-Dialogue Datasets

Máté Gedeon, Piroska Zsófia Barta, Peter Mihajlik, Tekla Etelka Graczi, Anna Kohári, Katalin Mády


Abstract
The advancement of automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been largely enhanced by extensive datasets in high-resource languages, while languages such as Hungarian remain underrepresented due to limited spontaneous and conversational corpora. To address this gap, we introduce two new datasets – BEA-Large and BEA-Dialogue – constructed from the previously unprocessed portions of the Hungarian speech corpus named BEA. BEA-Large extends BEA-Base with 255 hours of spontaneous speech from 433 speakers, enriched with detailed segment-level metadata. BEA-Dialogue, comprising 85 hours of spontaneous conversations, is a Hungarian speech corpus featuring natural dialogues partitioned into speaker-independent subsets, supporting research in conversational ASR and speaker diarization. We establish reproducible baselines on these datasets using publicly available ASR models, with the fine-tuned Fast Conformer model achieving word error rates as low as 14.18% on spontaneous and 4.8% on repeated speech. Diarization experiments yield diarization error rates between 12.46% and 17.40%, providing reference points for future improvements. The results highlight the persistent difficulty of conversational ASR, particularly due to disfluencies, overlaps, and informal speech patterns. By releasing these datasets and baselines, we aim to advance Hungarian speech technology and offer a methodological framework for developing spontaneous and conversational benchmarks in other languages.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.121
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
1562–1570
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-121
DOI:
10.63317/47jcmqefap7z
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Máté Gedeon, Piroska Zsófia Barta, Peter Mihajlik, Tekla Etelka Graczi, Anna Kohári, and Katalin Mády. 2026. Toward Conversational Hungarian Speech Recognition: Introducing the BEA-Large and BEA-Dialogue Datasets. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1562–1570, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Toward Conversational Hungarian Speech Recognition: Introducing the BEA-Large and BEA-Dialogue Datasets (Gedeon et al., LREC 2026)
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