Data-Efficient ASR Personalization for Non-Normative Speech Using an Uncertainty-Based Phoneme Difficulty Score for Guided Sampling

Niclas Pokel; Pehuén Moure; Roman Böhringer; Yingqiang Gao

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arXiv · 2509.20396

Data-Efficient ASR Personalization for Non-Normative Speech Using an Uncertainty-Based Phoneme Difficulty Score for Guided Sampling

Niclas Pokel·Pehuén Moure·Roman Böhringer·Yingqiang Gao

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Abstract

ASR systems struggle with non-normative speech due to high acoustic variability and data scarcity. We propose a data-efficient method using phoneme-level uncertainty to guide fine-tuning for personalization. Instead of computationally expensive ensembles, we leverage Variational Low-Rank Adaptation (VI LoRA) to estimate epistemic uncertainty in foundation models. These estimates form a composite Phoneme Difficulty Score (PhDScore) that drives a targeted oversampling strategy. Evaluated on English and German datasets, including a longitudinal analysis against two clinical reports taken one year apart, we demonstrate that: (1) VI LoRA-based uncertainty aligns better with expert clinical assessments than standard entropy; (2) PhDScore captures stable, persistent articulatory difficulties; and (3) uncertainty-guided sampling significantly improves ASR accuracy for impaired speech.

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Niclas Pokel, Pehuén Moure, Roman Böhringer, Yingqiang Gao. 2026-03-16. Data-Efficient ASR Personalization for Non-Normative Speech Using an Uncertainty-Based Phoneme Difficulty Score for Guided Sampling. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20396

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