PAREDA: A Multi-Accent Speech Dataset of Natural Language Processing Research Discussions

Sicheng Jin, Dipankar Srirag, Aditya Joshi


Abstract
While modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems achieve high accuracy on benchmark corpora, their performance often degrades when there is real-world variability. This work focuses on variability arising due to accented, spontaneous, and domain-specific speech. In particular, we introduce PAper REading DAtaset (PAREDA), a first-of-its-kind multi-accent speech dataset consisting of discussions on academic Natural Language Processing (NLP) papers between speakers with Australian, Indian-English, and Chinese English accents. Each session elicits a spontaneous monologue (a summary of a paper’s abstract) and a non-monologue (a question-and-answer session between participants), resulting in a corpus rich with technical jargon and conversational phenomena. We evaluate the performance of SOTA ASR models on PAREDA, analysing the impact of accent mixing and increased speech rate. Our results show that, in the zero-shot setting, models perform worse, confirming the dataset’s challenging nature. However, fine-tuning on PAREDA significantly reduces the Word Error Rate (WER), demonstrating that our dataset captures linguistic characteristics often missing from existing corpora. PAREDA serves as a valuable new resource for building and evaluating more robust and inclusive ASR systems for specialised, real-world applications.
Anthology ID:
2026.speakable-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of Speech Language Models in Low-Resource Settings: Performance, Evaluation, and Bias Analysis (SPEAKABLE) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Nina Hosseini-Kivanani, Alessio Brutti, Marco Matassoni, Sandipana Dowerah, Davide Liga, Christoph Schommer
Venues:
SPEAKABLE | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
8–15
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-speakable-02
DOI:
10.63317/5iy7wxvt4y5s
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sicheng Jin, Dipankar Srirag, and Aditya Joshi. 2026. PAREDA: A Multi-Accent Speech Dataset of Natural Language Processing Research Discussions. In Proceedings of Speech Language Models in Low-Resource Settings: Performance, Evaluation, and Bias Analysis (SPEAKABLE) @ LREC 2026, pages 8–15, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
PAREDA: A Multi-Accent Speech Dataset of Natural Language Processing Research Discussions (Jin et al., SPEAKABLE 2026)
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