Speech Language Models in Low-Resource Settings:
Performance, Evaluation, and Bias Analysis

Co-located with LREC 2026 • Full-Day Workshop

Workshop Program

May 11, 2026

Room: W11

Times are local (Palma).

09:00 – 09:20
Introduction and general remarks Chair: Nina Hosseini-Kivanani — RTL & University of Luxembourg
09:20 – 10:20
Invited speaker: Jordi Luque Chair: Alessio Brutti — FBK, Italy
10:20 – 10:30
Remote posters Chair: Nina Hosseini-Kivanani — RTL & University of Luxembourg 5 min each
Adapting Foundational ASR Models to Efik: An Empirical Study of an Extremely Low-Resource Tonal Language
Offiong Bassey Edet, Stephen Orok Duke, Enoima Essien Umoh, Benjamin Okon Nyong and Andrew Asuquo Nkpanam
PAREDA: A Multi-Accent Speech Dataset of Natural Language Processing Research Discussions
Sicheng Jin, Dipankar Srirag and Aditya Joshi
10:30 – 12:00
Coffee break and poster session Chair: Alessio Brutti — FBK, Italy
Say Again? The Limits of Whisper with Conversation. A Case Study on the KIParla Corpus.
Martina Simonotti, Ludovica Pannitto, Caterina Mauri, Adriano Ferraresi and Gabriele Carioli
Not All Polar Questions Are the Same: ASR, Humans, and Russian
Maria Onoeva
Quantizing Whisper: How Design Choices Affect ASR Performance
Arthur Söhler, Julian Irigoyen and Andreas Søeborg Kirkedal
“OK Aura, Be Fair with Me”: Demographics-Agnostic Training for Bias Mitigation in Wake-up Word Detection
Fernando López, Paula Delgado-Santos, Pablo Gómez, David Solans and Jordi Luque
Scalable Expansion of Multilingual Speech LLMs for ASR: A Continual Learning Approach
Lorenzo Concina, Marco Matassoni and Alessio Brutti
Responsible Benchmarking of Fairness for Automatic Speech Recognition
Felix E. Herron, Ange Richard, François Portet, Alexandre Allauzen and Solange Rossato
Addressing Accent Disparities in Automatic Speech Recognition: A Comparative Study of Single and Two-Step Adaptation
Mykhailo Danilevskyi, Fernando Perez-Tellez and Jelena Vasic
Investigating Speaker Pronunciation Variability in Speech Embeddings: Speaker and L1 Effects on French as a Second Language
Maxime Fily, Martine Adda-Decker and Guillaume Wisniewski
What LID Systems Say About Dialectal Variation. The Case of Yiddish, Quechua and Mande
Johanna Cordova, Eric Jordan and Valentina Fedchenko
HARNESS: Lightweight Distilled Arabic Speech Foundation Models
Vrunda Nileshkumar Sukhadia and Shammur Absar Chowdhury
When Does OmniASR Fail? A Fine-Grained Human Evaluation on Saudi Arabic Dialects
Hend Al-Khalifa
12:00 – 13:00
Spotlight papers Chair: Marco Matassoni — FBK, Italy
SpeechLM for Automatic Speech Recognition in Low-resource Languages
Md Abdur Razzaq Riyadh, Eneko Agirre, Eva Navas and Claudia Borg
Improving Low-resource ASR Using Bilingual Fine-tuning with Language Identification: A Cross-linguistic Evaluation
Reihaneh Amooie, Yun Hao, Wietse de Vries, Jelske Dijkstra, Matt Coler and Martijn Wieling
13:00 – 14:00
Lunch break
14:00 – 16:00
Architectures and learning methods Chair: Christoph Schommer — University of Luxembourg 15 min + 5 QA
Leveraging Speech Models for Audio-based Lexical Retrieval in Dictionaries: The Case of the Teochew Language
Siman Chen, Ilaine Wang, Maxime Fily and Pierre Magistry
Stage-Aware Cross-Lingual Transfer for Faroese ASR: When and Which Languages Matter
Dávid í Lág, Barbara Scalvini, Carlos Daniel Mena and Jón Guðnason
Doing More with Less: Determining Optimal Pre-training Model for Irish Automatic Speech Recognition through Multi-step Fine-tuning
Caoilfhionn Ní Dheoráin, Ruth Holmes, Nicholas Evans, Thomas Laurent, Anthony Ventresque and Ellen Rushe
Blank-Aware Decoding for Transcript-Free Phoneme Alignment in Low-Resource Languages and Dialects
Domenico De Cristofaro, Barbara Plank and Alessandro Vietti
On the Role of Encoder Depth: Pruning Whisper and LoRA Fine-Tuning in SLAM-ASR
Ganesh Pavan Kartikeya Bharadwaj Kolluri, Michael Kampouridis and Ravi Shekhar
TaLK-Corpus: A Regionally Diverse Evaluation Set for Sri Lankan Tamil Speech
Adsajan Thillainathan, Nishanthini Kanthakumar, Nivethiga Rasan and Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran
16:00 – 16:30
Coffee break
16:30 – 17:00
Best paper and closing remarks Chair: Nina Hosseini-Kivanani — RTL & University of Luxembourg

Presentation slides & posters

Presentation slides

Due to the size of the conference rooms, it is recommended to use 36 pt fonts for the presentation slides.

Posters

The size of poster holders is 90 cm × 150 cm and the format is vertical (portrait). The poster boards cannot accommodate landscape posters. You can print your poster in portrait A0 (84.1 × 118.9 cm).