Preethi Seshadri, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Ayomide Odumakinde, Sameer Singh, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Tack Hwa Wong, Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah, Thant Thiri Maung, Frederikus Hudi, David Anugraha, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Muhammad Reza Qorib, Amit Agarwal, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Vicky Feliren, Bahrul Ilmi Nasution, Manuel Antonio Rufino, Genta Indra Winata, Rian Adam Rajagede, Carlos Rafael Catalan, Mohamed Fazli Mohamed Imam, Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Salsabila Zahirah Pranida, Kevin Pratama, Yeshil Bangera, Adisai Na-Thalang, Patricia Nicole Monderin, Yueqi Song, Christian Simon, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Richardy Lobo Sapan, Taki Hasan Rafi, Bin Wang, Supryadi, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Matthew Theodore Roque, Karissa Vincentio, Takdanai Kreangphet, Phakphum Artkaew, Kadek Hendrawan Palgunadi, Yanzhi Yu, Rochana Prih Hastuti, William Nixon, Mithil Bangera, Adrian Xuan Wei Lim, Aye Hninn Khine, Hanif Muhammad Zhafran, Teddy Ferdinan, Audra Aurora Izzani, Ayushman Singh, Evan Evan, Jauza Akbar Krito, Michael Anugraha, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Haochen Li, John Amadeo Daniswara, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Eryawan Presma Yulianrifat, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Fadil Risdian Ansori, Mahardika Krisna Ihsani, Giang Nguyen, Anab Maulana Barik, Dan John Velasco, Rifo Ahmad Genadi, Saptarshi Saha, Chengwei Wei, Isaiah Edri W. Flores, Kenneth Chen Ko Han, Anjela Gail D. Santos, Wan Shen Lim, Kaung Si Phyo, Tim Santos, Meisyarah Dwiastuti, Jiayun Luo, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Ming Shan Hee, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, M.Alif Al Hakim, Muhammad Rizky Sya’ban, Kun Kerdthaisong, Lester James Validad Miranda, Fajri Koto, Tirana Noor Fatyanosa, Alham Fikri Aji, Jostin Jerico Rosal, Jun Kevin, Robert Wijaya, Onno P. Kampman, Ruochen Zhang, Börje F. Karlsson, Peerat Limkonchotiwat. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Natural Language Explanation (NLE) aims to elucidate the decision-making process by providing detailed, human-friendly explanations in natural language. It helps demystify the decision-making processes of large vision-language models (LVLMs) through the use of language models. While existing methods for creating a Vision Question-Answering with Natural Language Explanation (VQA-NLE) datasets can provide explanations, they heavily rely on human annotations that are time-consuming and costly. In this study, we propose a novel approach that leverages LVLMs to efficiently generate high-quality synthetic VQA-NLE datasets. By evaluating our synthetic data samples, we showcase how advanced prompting techniques can lead to the production of high-quality VQA-NLE data. Our findings indicate that this proposed method achieves up to 20x faster than human annotation, with only a minimal decrease in qualitative metrics, achieving robust quality that is nearly equivalent to human-annotated data. Furthermore, we show that incorporating visual prompts significantly enhances the relevance of text generation. Our study paves the way for a more efficient and robust automated generation of multi-modal NLE data, offering a promising solution to the problem.

We introduce a novel analysis that leverages linguistic minimal pairs to probe the internal linguistic representations of Large Language Models (LLMs). By measuring the similarity between LLM activation differences across minimal pairs, we quantify the linguistic similarity and gain insight into the linguistic knowledge captured by LLMs. Our large-scale experiments, spanning 100+ LLMs and 150k minimal pairs in three languages, reveal properties of linguistic similarity from four key aspects: consistency across LLMs, relation to theoretical categorizations, dependency to semantic context, and cross-lingual alignment of relevant phenomena. Our findings suggest that 1) linguistic similarity is significantly influenced by training data exposure, leading to higher cross-LLM agreement in higher-resource languages. 2) Linguistic similarity strongly aligns with fine-grained theoretical linguistic categories but weakly with broader ones. 3) Linguistic similarity shows a weak correlation with semantic similarity, showing its context-dependent nature. 4) LLMs exhibit limited cross-lingual alignment in their understanding of relevant linguistic phenomena. This work demonstrates the potential of minimal pairs as a window into the neural representations of language in LLMs, shedding light on the relationship between LLMs and linguistic theory.

Patch-based image tokenization ignores the morphology of the visual world, limiting effective and efficient learning of image understanding. Inspired by subword tokenization, we introduce subobject-level adaptive token segmentation and explore several approaches, including superpixel, SAM, and a proposed Efficient and PanOptiC (EPOC) image tokenizer. Our EPOC combines boundary detection–a simple task that can be handled well by a compact model–with watershed segmentation, which inherently guarantees no pixels are left unsegmented. Intrinsic evaluations across 5 datasets demonstrate that EPOC’s segmentation aligns well with human annotations of both object- and part-level visual morphology, producing more monosemantic tokens and offering substantial efficiency advantages. For extrinsic evaluation, we designed a token embedding that handles arbitrary-shaped tokens, and trained VLMs with different tokenizers on 4 datasets of object recognition and detailed captioning. The results reveal that subobject tokenization enables faster convergence and better generalization while using fewer visual tokens.

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Delong Chen, Yejin Bang, Leila Khalatbari, Bryan Wilie, Ziwei Ji, Etsuko Ishii, Pascale Fung. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Genta Indra Winata, Frederikus Hudi, Patrick Amadeus Irawan, David Anugraha, Rifki Afina Putri, Wang Yutong, Adam Nohejl, Ubaidillah Ariq Prathama, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Afifa Amriani, Anar Rzayev, Anirban Das, Ashmari Pramodya, Aulia Adila, Bryan Wilie, Candy Olivia Mawalim, Cheng Ching Lam, Daud Abolade, Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Fariz Ikhwantri, Garry Kuwanto, Hanyang Zhao, Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo, Holy Lovenia, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Jan Wira Gotama Putra, Junho Myung, Lucky Susanto, Maria Angelica Riera Machin, Marina Zhukova, Michael Anugraha, Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Natasha Christabelle Santosa, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Raj Dabre, Rio Alexander Audino, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Stephanie Yulia Salim, Yi Zhou, Yinxuan Gui, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Shogo Okada, Ayu Purwarianti, Alham Fikri Aji, Taro Watanabe, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Alice Oh, Chong-Wah Ngo. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Fajri Koto, Rifki Afina Putri, Emmanuel Dave, Jhonson Lee, Nuur Shadieq, Wawan Cenggoro, Salsabil Maulana Akbar, Muhammad Ihza Mahendra, Dea Annisayanti Putri, Bryan Wilie, Genta Indra Winata, Alham Fikri Aji, Ayu Purwarianti, Pascale Fung. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Jessica Zosa Forde, Ruochen Zhang, Lintang Sutawika, Alham Fikri Aji, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Genta Indra Winata, Minghao Wu, Carsten Eickhoff, Stella Biderman, Ellie Pavlick. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

Holy Lovenia, Rahmad Mahendra, Salsabil Maulana Akbar, Lester James V. Miranda, Jennifer Santoso, Elyanah Aco, Akhdan Fadhilah, Jonibek Mansurov, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Onno P. Kampman, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Frederikus Hudi, Railey Montalan, Ryan Ignatius, Joanito Agili Lopo, William Nixon, Börje F. Karlsson, James Jaya, Ryandito Diandaru, Yuze Gao, Patrick Amadeus, Bin Wang, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Chenxi Whitehouse, Ivan Halim Parmonangan, Maria Khelli, Wenyu Zhang, Lucky Susanto, Reynard Adha Ryanda, Sonny Lazuardi Hermawan, Dan John Velasco, Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar, Willy Fitra Hendria, Yasmin Moslem, Noah Flynn, Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Haochen Li, Johanes Lee, R. Damanhuri, Shuo Sun, Muhammad Reza Qorib, Amirbek Djanibekov, Wei Qi Leong, Quyet V. Do, Niklas Muennighoff, Tanrada Pansuwan, Ilham Firdausi Putra, Yan Xu, Tai Ngee Chia, Ayu Purwarianti, Sebastian Ruder, William Tjhi, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Alham Fikri Aji, Sedrick Keh, Genta Indra Winata, Ruochen Zhang, Fajri Koto, Zheng-Xin Yong, Samuel Cahyawijaya. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

The capability to reason from text is crucial for real-world NLP applications.Real-world scenarios often involve incomplete or evolving data.In response, individuals update their beliefs and understandings accordingly.However, most existing evaluations assume that language models (LMs) operate with consistent information.We introduce Belief-R 1 , a new dataset designed to test LMs' belief revision ability when presented with new evidence.Inspired by how humans suppress prior inferences, this task assesses LMs within the newly proposed delta reasoning (∆R) framework.Belief-R features sequences of premises designed to simulate scenarios where additional information could necessitate prior conclusions drawn by LMs.We evaluate ∼30 LMs across diverse prompting strategies and found that LMs generally struggle to appropriately revise their beliefs in response to new information.Further, models adept at updating often underperformed in scenarios without necessary updates, highlighting a critical trade-off.These insights underscore the importance of improving LMs' adaptiveness to changing information, a step toward more reliable AI systems.

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Pascale Fung. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Visual Question Answering~(VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, which requires models to understand and reason on knowledge present in visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA datasets and models are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images that are Western-centric. While recent efforts have tried to increase the number of languages covered on VQA datasets, they still lack diversity in low-resource languages. More importantly, some datasets extend the text to other languages, either via translation or some other approaches, but usually keep the same images, resulting in narrow cultural representation. To address these limitations, we create CVQA, a new Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering benchmark dataset, designed to cover a rich set of languages and regions, where we engage native speakers and cultural experts in the data collection process. CVQA includes culturally-driven images and questions from across 28 countries in four continents, covering 26 languages with 11 scripts, providing a total of 9k questions. We benchmark several Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on CVQA, and we show that the dataset is challenging for the current state-of-the-art models. This benchmark will serve as a probing evaluation suite for assessing the cultural bias of multimodal models and hopefully encourage more research efforts towards increasing cultural awareness and linguistic diversity in this field.

Genta Indra Winata, Alham Fikri Aji, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Rahmad Mahendra, Fajri Koto, Ade Romadhony, Kemal Kurniawan, David Moeljadi, Radityo Eko Prasojo, Pascale Fung, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han Lau, Rico Sennrich, Sebastian Ruder. Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2023.

Yueqi Song, Simran Khanuja, Pengfei Liu, Fahim Faisal, Alissa Ostapenko, Genta Winata, Alham Aji, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Yulia Tsvetkov, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown great capabilities in a wide range of tasks, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance through zero-shot or few-shot prompting methods.While there have been extensive studies on their abilities in monolingual tasks, the investigation of their potential in the context of code-switching (CSW), the practice of alternating languages within an utterance, remains relatively uncharted.In this paper, we provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of various multilingual LLMs, benchmarking their performance across four tasks: sentiment analysis, machine translation, summarization and wordlevel language identification.Our results indicate that despite multilingual LLMs exhibiting promising outcomes in certain tasks using zero or few-shot prompting, they still underperform in comparison to fine-tuned models of much smaller scales.We argue that current "multilingualism" in LLMs does not inherently imply proficiency with code-switching texts, calling for future research to bridge this discrepancy.

Yejin Bang, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Nayeon Lee, Wenliang Dai, Dan Su, Bryan Wilie, Holy Lovenia, Ziwei Ji, Tiezheng Yu, Willy Chung, Quyet V. Do, Yan Xu, Pascale Fung. Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Fajri Koto, Dea Adhista, Emmanuel Dave, Sarah Oktavianti, Salsabil Akbar, Jhonson Lee, Nuur Shadieq, Tjeng Wawan Cenggoro, Hanung Linuwih, Bryan Wilie, Galih Muridan, Genta Winata, David Moeljadi, Alham Fikri Aji, Ayu Purwarianti, Pascale Fung. Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Bryan Wilie, Yan Xu, Willy Chung, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Pascale Fung. Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Speech emotion recognition plays a crucial role in human-computer interactions. However, most speech emotion recognition research is biased toward English-speaking adults, which hinders its applicability to other demographic groups in different languages and age groups. In this work, we analyze the transferability of emotion recognition across three different languages-English, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese; and 2 different age groups-adults and the elderly. To conduct the experiment, we develop an English-Mandarin speech emotion benchmark for adults and the elderly, BiMotion, and a Cantonese speech emotion dataset, YueMotion. This study concludes that different language and age groups require specific speech features, thus making cross-lingual inference an unsuitable method. However, cross-group data augmentation is still beneficial to regularize the model, with linguistic distance being a significant influence on cross-lingual transferability. We release publicly release our code at https://github.com/HLTCHKUST/elderly_ser.

Alham Fikri Aji, Genta Indra Winata, Fajri Koto, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Ade Romadhony, Rahmad Mahendra, Kemal Kurniawan, David Moeljadi, Radityo Eko Prasojo, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han Lau, Sebastian Ruder. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022.

With the rise of deep learning and intelligent vehicles, the smart assistant has become an essential in-car component to facilitate driving and provide extra functionalities. In-car smart assistants should be able to process general as well as car-related commands and perform corresponding actions, which eases driving and improves safety. However, there is a data scarcity issue for low resource languages, hindering the development of research and applications. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, Cantonese In-car Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (CI-AVSR), for in-car command recognition in the Cantonese language with both video and audio data. It consists of 4,984 samples (8.3 hours) of 200 in-car commands recorded by 30 native Cantonese speakers. Furthermore, we augment our dataset using common in-car background noises to simulate real environments, producing a dataset 10 times larger than the collected one. We provide detailed statistics of both the clean and the augmented versions of our dataset. Moreover, we implement two multimodal baselines to demonstrate the validity of CI-AVSR. Experiment results show that leveraging the visual signal improves the overall performance of the model. Although our best model can achieve a considerable quality on the clean test set, the speech recognition quality on the noisy data is still inferior and remains an extremely challenging task for real in-car speech recognition systems. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/HLTCHKUST/CI-AVSR.

Code-switching is a speech phenomenon occurring when a speaker switches language during a conversation. Despite the spontaneous nature of code-switching in conversational spoken language, most existing works collect code-switching data from read speech instead of spontaneous speech. ASCEND (A Spontaneous Chinese-English Dataset) is a high-quality Mandarin Chinese-English code-switching corpus built on spontaneous multi-turn conversational dialogue sources collected in Hong Kong. We report ASCEND’s design and procedure for collecting the speech data, including annotations. ASCEND consists of 10.62 hours of clean speech, collected from 23 bilingual speakers of Chinese and English. Furthermore, we conduct baseline experiments using pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 models, achieving a best performance of 22.69% character error rate and 27.05% mixed error rate.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) on low resource languages improves the access of linguistic minorities to technological advantages provided by artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, we address the problem of data scarcity for the Hong Kong Cantonese language by creating a new Cantonese dataset. Our dataset, Multi-Domain Cantonese Corpus (MDCC), consists of 73.6 hours of clean read speech paired with transcripts, collected from Cantonese audiobooks from Hong Kong. It comprises philosophy, politics, education, culture, lifestyle and family domains, covering a wide range of topics. We also review all existing Cantonese datasets and analyze them according to their speech type, data source, total size and availability. We further conduct experiments with Fairseq S2T Transformer, a state-of-the-art ASR model, on the biggest existing dataset, Common Voice zh-HK, and our proposed MDCC, and the results show the effectiveness of our dataset. In addition, we create a powerful and robust Cantonese ASR model by applying multi-dataset learning on MDCC and Common Voice zh-HK.

Training and evaluating language models increasingly requires the construction of meta-datasets -- diverse collections of curated data with clear provenance. Natural language prompting has recently lead to improved zero-shot generalization by transforming existing, supervised datasets into a variety of novel instruction tuning tasks, highlighting the benefits of meta-dataset curation. While successful in general-domain text, translating these data-centric approaches to biomedical language modeling remains challenging, as labeled biomedical datasets are significantly underrepresented in popular data hubs. To address this challenge, we introduce BigBio a community library of 126+ biomedical NLP datasets, currently covering 13 task categories and 10+ languages. BigBio facilitates reproducible meta-dataset curation via programmatic access to datasets and their metadata, and is compatible with current platforms for prompt engineering and end-to-end few/zero shot language model evaluation. We discuss our process for task schema harmonization, data auditing, contribution guidelines, and outline two illustrative use cases: zero-shot evaluation of biomedical prompts and large-scale, multi-task learning. BigBio is an ongoing community effort and is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/biomedical

Cross-domain named entity recognition (NER) models are able to cope with the scarcity issue of NER samples in target domains. However, most of the existing NER benchmarks lack domain-specialized entity types or do not focus on a certain domain, leading to a less effective cross-domain evaluation. To address these obstacles, we introduce a cross-domain NER dataset (CrossNER), a fully-labeled collection of NER data spanning over five diverse domains with specialized entity categories for different domains. Additionally, we also provide a domain-related corpus since using it to continue pre-training language models (domain-adaptive pre-training) is effective for the domain adaptation. We then conduct comprehensive experiments to explore the effectiveness of leveraging different levels of the domain corpus and pre-training strategies to do domain-adaptive pre-training for the cross-domain task. Results show that focusing on the fractional corpus containing domain-specialized entities and utilizing a more challenging pre-training strategy in domain-adaptive pre-training are beneficial for the NER domain adaptation, and our proposed method can consistently outperform existing cross-domain NER baselines. Nevertheless, experiments also illustrate the challenge of this cross-domain NER task. We hope that our dataset and baselines will catalyze research in the NER domain adaptation area. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zliucr/CrossNER.

Cross-lingual models trained on source language tasks possess the capability to directly transfer to target languages. However, since word order variances generally exist in different languages, cross-lingual models that overfit into the word order of the source language could have sub-optimal performance in target languages. In this paper, we hypothesize that reducing the word order information fitted into the models can improve the adaptation performance in target languages. To verify this hypothesis, we introduce several methods to make models encode less word order information of the source language and test them based on cross-lingual word embeddings and the pre-trained multilingual model. Experimental results on three sequence labeling tasks (i.e., part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and slot filling tasks) show that reducing word order information injected into the model can achieve better zero-shot cross-lingual performance. Further analysis illustrates that fitting excessive or insufficient word order information into the model results in inferior cross-lingual performance. Moreover, our proposed methods can also be applied to strong cross-lingual models and further improve their performance.

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Genta Indra Winata, Bryan Wilie, Karissa Vincentio, Xiaohong Li, Adhiguna Kuncoro, Sebastian Ruder, Zhi Yuan Lim, Syafri Bahar, Masayu Khodra, Ayu Purwarianti, Pascale Fung. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2021.

Wenliang Dai, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Zihan Liu, Pascale Fung. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

Over the past year, research in various domains, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), has been accelerated to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, yet such research has just started on dialogue systems.In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end dialogue system which aims to ease the isolation of people under self-quarantine.We conduct a control simulation experiment to assess the effects of the user interface, a web-based virtual agent called Nora vs. the android ERICA via a video call.The experimental results show that the android offers a more valuable user experience by giving the impression of being more empathetic and engaging in the conversation due to its nonverbal information, such as facial expressions and body gestures.Demo video available at https://youtu.be/PLPEBXLeKJI.

An increasing number of people in the world today speak a mixed-language as a result of being multilingual.However, building a speech recognition system for code-switching remains difficult due to the availability of limited resources and the expense and significant effort required to collect mixed-language data.We therefore propose a new learning method, meta-transfer learning, to transfer learn on a code-switched speech recognition system in a low-resource setting by judiciously extracting information from high-resource monolingual datasets.Our model learns to recognize individual languages, and transfer them so as to better recognize mixed-language speech by conditioning the optimization on the codeswitching data.Based on experimental results, our model outperforms existing baselines on speech recognition and language modeling tasks, and is faster to converge.

Highly performing deep neural networks come at the cost of computational complexity that limits their practicality for deployment on portable devices. We propose the low-rank transformer (LRT), a memory-efficient and fast neural architecture that significantly reduces the parameters and boosts the speed of training and inference for end-to-end speech recognition. Our approach reduces the number of parameters of the network by more than 50% and speeds up the inference time by around 1.35x compared to the baseline transformer model. The experiments show that our LRT model generalizes better and yields lower error rates on both validation and test sets compared to an uncompressed transformer model. The LRT model outperforms those from existing works on several datasets in an end-to-end setting without using an external language model or acoustic data.

Local dialects influence people to pronounce words of the same language differently from each other. The great variability and complex characteristics of accents create a major challenge for training a robust and accent-agnostic automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. In this paper, we introduce a cross-accented English speech recognition task as a benchmark for measuring the ability of the model to adapt to unseen accents using the existing CommonVoice corpus. We also propose an accent-agnostic approach that extends the model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) algorithm for fast adaptation to unseen accents. Our approach significantly outperforms joint training in both zero-shot, few-shot, and all-shot in the mixed-region and cross-region settings in terms of word error rate. Copyright © 2020 ISCA