Speak in Context: Multilingual ASR with Speech–Context Alignment via Contrastive Learning

Yuchen Zhang, Haralambos Mouratidis, Ravi Shekhar


Abstract
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has benefited from advances in pretrained speech and language models, yet most systems remain constrained to monolingual settings and short, isolated utterances. While recent efforts in context-aware ASR show promise, two key challenges persist: limited multilingual support and the absence of principled alignment between speech and contextual representations. In this paper, we introduce a context-aware multilingual ASR framework that supports diverse languages and accents while preserving the modularity of pretrained models. Our approach combines a frozen speech encoder and a decoder-only language model via a lightweight projection module, allowing structured context prompts, including dialogue history and biasing words, to guide transcription. To improve interaction between speech and context, we employ a contrastive learning objective that aligns their representations in a shared embedding space. Evaluations on over 1,500 hours of real-world conversational speech across 11 languages and 5 English dialects show that contextual input consistently improves recognition quality. Contrastive alignment provides additional gains when applied to different context types, with an overall performance gain of over 5%. These results highlight the importance of both contextual modeling and cross-modal alignment in multilingual ASR.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.466
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:
5873–5882
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-466
DOI:
10.63317/55r6d5b9jek6
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuchen Zhang, Haralambos Mouratidis, and Ravi Shekhar. 2026. Speak in Context: Multilingual ASR with Speech–Context Alignment via Contrastive Learning. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5873–5882, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Speak in Context: Multilingual ASR with Speech–Context Alignment via Contrastive Learning (Zhang et al., LREC 2026)
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