Persona-ASR: Bilingual Target-Speaker Speech Recognition for Kazakh–English Overlapping Speech
Target-speaker automatic speech recognition (TS-ASR) enables transcription of a specific speaker in multi-talker environments, yet remains largely unexplored for multilingual, low-resource languages. Existing TS-ASR systems predominantly target monolingual English using diarization-based or speaker-embedding approaches, leaving a critical gap for languages such as Kazakh, where code-switching with Russian and English is commonplace. We propose Persona-ASR, a modular two-stage architecture. The first stage is an explicit target-presence gate that verifies whether the enrolled speaker appears in the mixture and emits a token to suppress transcription when the speaker is absent, directly addressing the acoustic-hallucination failure mode of prior systems. The second stage performs enrollment-conditioned recognition: a 192-dimensional ECAPA-TDNN speaker embedding modulates a WavLM-Base-Plus encoder through feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM), while language-specific CTC heads enable joint Kazakh and English decoding without forcing Latin and Cyrillic symbols to compete in a single output space. To evaluate the system, we introduce KazMix3, a Kazakh overlap dataset for TS-ASR training, and PersonaMix, a controlled bilingual benchmark spanning same- and cross-language enrollment across varying interferer counts (1–3) and signal-to-noise ratios (−3 to +3 dB). Persona-ASR outperforms a strong off-the-shelf cascade baseline by 13.3 WER points on English and 24.6 on Kazakh, and matches a published monolingual English baseline. On PersonaMix, speaker conditioning reduces relative word error rate by 40.7% on English and 59.3% on Kazakh mixtures over an unconditioned variant of the same model, and cross-language enrollment (unseen during training) remains effective, increasing average raw WER by only 4.1 points (English) and 2.2 points (Kazakh) relative to same-language enrollment. To our knowledge, Persona-ASR is the first TS-ASR system for the Kazakh language, establishing a foundation for multilingual personalized ASR in low-resource settings.