Niharika Sri Parasa

Kaushal Santosh Bhogale, Deovrat Mehendale, Niharika Parasa et al.

In this study, we tackle the challenge of limited labeled data for low-resource languages in ASR, focusing on Hindi. Specifically, we explore pseudo-labeling, by proposing a generic framework combining multiple ideas from existing works. Our framework integrates multiple base models for transcription and evaluators for assessing audio-transcript pairs, resulting in robust pseudo-labeling for low resource languages. We validate our approach with a new benchmark, IndicYT, comprising diverse YouTube audio files from multiple content categories. Our findings show that augmenting pseudo labeled data from YouTube with existing training data leads to significant performance improvements on IndicYT, without affecting performance on out-of-domain benchmarks, demonstrating the efficacy of pseudo-labeled data in enhancing ASR capabilities for low-resource languages. The benchmark, code and models developed as a part of this work will be made publicly available.

Kaushal Santosh Bhogale, Tahir Javed, Greeshma Susan John et al.

Evaluating ASR systems for Indian languages is challenging due to spelling variations, suffix splitting flexibility, and non-standard spellings in code-mixed words. Traditional Word Error Rate (WER) often presents a bleaker picture of system performance than what human users perceive. Better aligning evaluation with real-world performance requires capturing permissible orthographic variations, which is extremely challenging for under-resourced Indian languages. Leveraging recent advances in LLMs, we propose a framework for creating benchmarks that capture permissible variations. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that OIWER, by accounting for orthographic variations, reduces pessimistic error rates (an average improvement of 6.3 points), narrows inflated model gaps (e.g., Gemini-Canary performance difference drops from 18.1 to 11.5 points), and aligns more closely with human perception than prior methods like WER-SN by 4.9 points.

Niharika Sri Parasa, Chaitali Diwan, Srinath Srinivasa

One of the primary challenges in online learning environments, is to retain learner engagement. Several different instructional strategies are proposed both in online and offline environments to enhance learner engagement. The Concept Attainment Model is one such instructional strategy that focuses on learners acquiring a deeper understanding of a concept rather than just its dictionary definition. This is done by searching and listing the properties used to distinguish examples from non-examples of various concepts. Our work attempts to apply the Concept Attainment Model to build conceptual riddles, to deploy over online learning environments. The approach involves creating factual triples from learning resources, classifying them based on their uniqueness to a concept into `Topic Markers' and `Common', followed by generating riddles based on the Concept Attainment Model's format and capturing all possible solutions to those riddles. The results obtained from the human evaluation of riddles prove encouraging.

Niharika Sri Parasa, Chaitali Diwan, Srinath Srinivasa

Riddles are concise linguistic puzzles that describe an object or idea through indirect, figurative, or playful clues. They are a longstanding form of creative expression, requiring the solver to interpret hints, recognize patterns, and draw inferences to identify the answers. In this work, we introduce a simple pipeline for creating and evaluating analogy-based riddles. The system includes a triples creator that builds structured facts about a concept, a semantic mapper that selects attributes useful for analogy, a stylized generator that turns them into riddle clues, and a validator that collects all possible answers the riddle could point to. We use this validator to study whether large language models can recover the full answer set for different riddle types. Our case study shows that while models often guess the main intended answer, they frequently miss other valid interpretations. This highlights the value of riddles as a lightweight tool for examining reasoning coverage and ambiguity handling in language models.