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

arXiv:2607.10256v1 Announce Type: new 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 syn...