Evaluating the Effect of Linguistic Relatedness on Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition

Andrei Florian; Cynthia Jayne Amol; Hope Kerubo Ombaba; Xiaoyu Cui; Boniface Mwau; Biatus Maina Kamau; Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare; Christiane Fellbaum; Happy Buzaaba

arXiv · 2607.04814

Evaluating the Effect of Linguistic Relatedness on Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition

Andrei Florian·Cynthia Jayne Amol·Hope Kerubo Ombaba·Xiaoyu Cui·Boniface Mwau·Biatus Maina Kamau·Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare·Christiane Fellbaum·Happy Buzaaba

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Abstract

Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale. A promising direction is to leverage the linguistic relatedness between a low-resource target language and languages previously seen by a model to reduce the volume of target-language data needed for effective adaptation. Although this approach has proven reliable for text-based models, its effectiveness in the speech domain remains contested. We employ a systematic controlled experimental design spanning six factors, two Africa-centric corpora, and four large ASR models, sequentially adapting on a related auxiliary language followed by the target to isolate whether linguistic relatedness reliably predicts cross-lingual transfer gains across these conditions. In every setting, pre-adaptation on related auxiliary languages yields no practically meaningful improvements once as little as one hour of target-language data is available, suggesting that relatedness alone may not reliably predict transfer gains in large multilingual ASR, or constitute an effective strategy for extending such models to low-resource languages.

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Andrei Florian, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Hope Kerubo Ombaba, Xiaoyu Cui, Boniface Mwau, Biatus Maina Kamau, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Christiane Fellbaum, Happy Buzaaba. 2026-07-27. Evaluating the Effect of Linguistic Relatedness on Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04814

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