Nwāchā Munā: A Devanagari Speech Corpus and Proximal Transfer Benchmark for Nepal Bhasha ASR
Nepal Bhasha (Newari), an endangered language of the Kathmandu Valley, remains digitally marginalized due to the severe scarcity of annotated speech resources. In this work, we introduce Nwāchā Munā, a newly curated 5.39-hour manually transcribed Devanagari speech corpus for Nepal Bhasha, and establish the first benchmark using script-preserving acoustic modeling. We investigate whether proximal cross-lingual transfer from a geographically and linguistically adjacent language (Nepali) can rival large-scale multilingual pretraining in an ultra-low-resource Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) setting. Fine-tuning a Nepali Conformer model reduces the Character Error Rate (CER) from a 52.54% z...
| Authors | Rishikesh Kumar Sharma, Safal Narshing Shrestha, Jenny Poudel et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 March 2026 |
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