Dialect Identification (DI) is a task to recognize different dialects within the same language from a speech signal. DI can help to improve the downstream speech related tasks even when speakers have a strong dialect. However, fine-tuning a speech model for tasks like DI is expensive in terms of computation cost and memory requirement. Recent studies have explored fine-tuning pre-trained speech models for tasks like DI using Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, which offer parameter efficiency but limited improvement in memory efficiency and training speed. To address these challenges, we explore Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning (MEFT) methods, originally proposed for language processing, and apply them to the general-purpose pre-trained speech model. We then comprehensively analyze the GPU memory usage and fine-tuning speed based on various MEFT methods. As a case study, we fine-tune the Whisper model to identify six Mandarin subdialects from the KeSpeech dataset, reducing GPU memory usage by up to 73.25% and accelerating training speed by a factor of 2.1, while maintaining accuracy comparable to vanilla fine-tuning and PEFT methods.

Authorship profiling is the process of identifying an author's characteristics based on their writings. This centuries old problem has become more intriguing especially with recent developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this paper, we introduce a corpus of short texts in the Romanian language, annotated with certain author characteristic keywords; to our knowledge, the first of its kind. In order to do this, we exploit a social media platform called Reddit. We leverage its thematic community-based structure (subreddits structure), which offers information about the author's background. We infer an user's demographic and some broad personal traits, such as age category, employment status, interests, and social orientation based on the subreddit and other cues. We thus obtain a 23k+ samples corpus, extracted from 100+ Romanian subreddits. We analyse our dataset, and finally, we fine-tune and evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) to prove baselines capabilities for authorship profiling using the corpus, indicating the need for further research in the field. We publicly release all our resources.

Kurdish, an Indo-European language spoken by over 30 million speakers, is considered a dialect continuum and known for its diversity in language varieties. Previous studies addressing language and speech technology for Kurdish handle it in a monolithic way as a macro-language, resulting in disparities for dialects and varieties for which there are few resources and tools available. In this paper, we take a step towards developing resources for language and speech technology for varieties of Central Kurdish, creating a corpus by transcribing movies and TV series as an alternative to fieldwork. Additionally, we report the performance of machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and language identification as downstream tasks evaluated on Central Kurdish varieties. Data and models are publicly available under an open license at https://github.com/sinaahmadi/CORDI.