  Automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance has improved drastically in
recent years, mainly enabled by self-supervised learning (SSL) based acoustic
models such as wav2vec2 and large-scale multi-lingual training like Whisper. A
huge challenge still exists for low-resource languages where the availability
of both audio and text is limited. This is further complicated by the presence
of multiple dialects like in Indian languages. However, many Indian languages
can be grouped into the same families and share the same script and grammatical
structure. This is where a lot of adaptation and fine-tuning techniques can be
applied to overcome the low-resource nature of the data by utilising
well-resourced similar languages.
  In such scenarios, it is important to understand the extent to which each
modality, like acoustics and text, is important in building a reliable ASR. It
could be the case that an abundance of acoustic data in a language reduces the
need for large text-only corpora. Or, due to the availability of various
pretrained acoustic models, the vice-versa could also be true. In this proposed
special session, we encourage the community to explore these ideas with the
data in two low-resource Indian languages of Bengali and Bhojpuri. These
approaches are not limited to Indian languages, the solutions are potentially
applicable to various languages spoken around the world.
