ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025

Fine-tuning Strategies for Automatic Speech Recognition of Low-Resource Speech with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Yeseul Park, Bowon Lee

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit unique speech patterns that challenge conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. However, research on ASD-adapted ASR models remains limited. This study explores fine-tuning strategies for ASD-specific ASR models using Whisper, comparing full fine-tuning, selective fine-tuning, adapter tuning, and LoRA-based fine-tuning. Experiments using a small-scale Korean ASD speech dataset demonstrate that adapter tuning and LoRA significantly reduce the character error rate (CER) while reducing trainable parameters. In case of Whisper-small, adapter tuning and LoRA improve the CER by 7.22% and 10.14% over full fine-tuning, respectively. Furthermore, LoRA improved CER by 10.35% and 10.15% with Whisper-base and Whisper-large-v2 models compared to full fine-tuning. These results demonstrate the adaptation efficiency and effectiveness of LoRA for low resource ASD speech dataset.