Akriti Dhasmana

Akriti Dhasmana

she/her

PhD Student

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portfolio

publications

Dialect Matters: Cross-Lingual ASR Transfer for Low-Resource Indic Language Varieties

Published in Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on {NLP} for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, 2026

We conduct an empirical study of cross-lingual transfer using spontaneous, noisy, and code-mixed speech across a wide range of Indic dialects and language varieties. Our results indicate that although ASR performance is generally associated with phylogenetic distance across languages, this factor alone does not fully explain performance in dialectal settings. Often, fine-tuning on smaller amounts of dialectal data yields performance comparable to fine-tuning on larger amounts of phylogenetically-related, high-resource standardized languages. We also present a case study on Garhwali, a low-resource Pahari language variety, and evaluate multiple contemporary ASR models. Finally, we analyze transcription errors to examine bias toward pre-training languages, providing additional insight into challenges faced by ASR systems on dialectal and non-standardized speech.

Recommended citation: Dialect Matters: Cross-Lingual ASR Transfer for Low-Resource Indic Language Varieties (Dhasmana et al., VarDial 2026)
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talks

teaching

Teaching experience 1

Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014

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Teaching experience 2

Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015

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