cs.CLJul 11, 2026

Which Languages Transfer Best to Warlpiri? A Similarity-Based Study for Low-Resource ASR

Authors: Pravina MylvaganamEliathamby AmbikairajahTing DangVidhyasaharan SethuTuende Szalay

Organizations: University of New South Wales, Australia · University of Melbourne, Australia · University of Sydney, Australia

Abstract

This paper investigates how language similarity can improve cross-lingual transfer for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in extremely low-resource settings. Warlpiri, an Australian Aboriginal language, has very limited transcribed speech data, making transfer learning essential. We propose a framework combining acoustic similarity from pre-trained speech models with linguistic similarity based on typology, phoneme inventories, grammatical, and syntactic features to rank high-resource source languages and evaluate their effectiveness for ASR transfer to Warlpiri. Experiments with Whisper show that acoustically and typologically similar languages outperform monolingual and multilingual baselines. Assamese and Hindi achieve substantial reductions in word and character error rates. Correlation analysis further indicates that acoustic similarity is the strongest predictor of fine-tuning performance, while phoneme inventory and typological similarity better explain zero-shot transfer.

Explore similar work

CardsList