Whisper-Based Speech Transcription from Videos Across Multiple Languages for Cross-Cultural Understanding — Paper

Abstract

Cross-cultural understanding has become increasingly important in today's highly connected, cross-national world. The success of LLM-based technologies is now driving the development of automated tools to aid understanding for nonnative people trying to succeed in cross-cultural environments. Building such automated tools is often done by leveraging in-thewild text, audio, and video data. This paper presents techniques for improving speech recognition-based transcript creation in multiple languages from videos to better train these automated tools. The focus is on processes and speech tools that can easily be used by cross-cultural tool builders without requiring deep speech processing expertise. Using publicly available videos from YouTube and Whisper-based tools, average transcription error rate across seven languages (Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Turkish, Russian, and Hebrew) of 30% are observed. With a modest amount of fine-tuning data, the average error rate can be reduced to 20% making such output much more usable for downstream processing. Speech and metadata associated with these videos that can be used by the community to further refine these experiments are released as well.

Authors 1

Michael Picheny

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.11772
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 4 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: cross
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 4 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.11772
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 4 h agohigh
Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 4 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.11772
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 4 h agohigh
Primary category: eess.AS
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 4 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 4 h agohigh

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T19

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4 h ago

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Authors: Michael Picheny

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Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
eess.AS	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperWhisper-Based Speech Transcription from Videos Across Multiple Languages for Cross-Cultural Understanding
New paper: Whisper-Based Speech Transcription from Videos Across Multiple Languages for Cross-Cultural Understanding
arxiv
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Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.CL	feed	T1· Official	2 h ago	1

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