Speech Recognition for Greek Dialects: A Challenging Benchmark

Language technologies should be judged on their usefulness in real-world use cases. Despite recent impressive progress in automatic speech recognition (ASR), an often overlooked aspect in ASR research and evaluation is language variation in the form of non-standard dialects or language varieties. To this end, this work introduces a challenging benchmark that focuses on four varieties of Greek (Aivaliot, Cretan, Griko, Messenian) encompassing challenges related to data availability, orthographic conventions, and complexities arising from language contact. Initial experiments with state-of-the-art models and established cross-lingual transfer techniques highlight the difficulty of adapting to such low-resource varieties.