Open Source State-Of-the-Art Solution for Romanian Speech Recognition

Gabriel Pirlogeanu; Alexandru-Lucian Georgescu; Horia Cucu

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arXiv · 2511.03361

Open Source State-Of-the-Art Solution for Romanian Speech Recognition

Gabriel Pirlogeanu·Alexandru-Lucian Georgescu·Horia Cucu

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Abstract

In this work, we present a new state-of-the-art Romanian Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system based on NVIDIA's FastConformer architecture--explored here for the first time in the context of Romanian. We train our model on a large corpus of, mostly, weakly supervised transcriptions, totaling over 2,600 hours of speech. Leveraging a hybrid decoder with both Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and Token-Duration Transducer (TDT) branches, we evaluate a range of decoding strategies including greedy, ALSD, and CTC beam search with a 6-gram token-level language model. Our system achieves state-of-the-art performance across all Romanian evaluation benchmarks, including read, spontaneous, and domain-specific speech, with up to 27% relative WER reduction compared to previous best-performing systems. In addition to improved transcription accuracy, our approach demonstrates practical decoding efficiency, making it suitable for both research and deployment in low-latency ASR applications.

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BibTeX RIS

Gabriel Pirlogeanu, Alexandru-Lucian Georgescu, Horia Cucu. 2025-11-05. Open Source State-Of-the-Art Solution for Romanian Speech Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03361

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