English

KinSPEAK: Improving speech recognition for Kinyarwanda via semi-supervised learning methods

Audio and Speech Processing 2024-03-05 v3 Machine Learning Sound

Abstract

Despite recent availability of large transcribed Kinyarwanda speech data, achieving robust speech recognition for Kinyarwanda is still challenging. In this work, we show that using self-supervised pre-training, following a simple curriculum schedule during fine-tuning and using semi-supervised learning to leverage large unlabelled speech data significantly improve speech recognition performance for Kinyarwanda. Our approach focuses on using public domain data only. A new studio-quality speech dataset is collected from a public website, then used to train a clean baseline model. The clean baseline model is then used to rank examples from a more diverse and noisy public dataset, defining a simple curriculum training schedule. Finally, we apply semi-supervised learning to label and learn from large unlabelled data in five successive generations. Our final model achieves 3.2% word error rate (WER) on the new dataset and 15.6% WER on Mozilla Common Voice benchmark, which is state-of-the-art to the best of our knowledge. Our experiments also indicate that using syllabic rather than character-based tokenization results in better speech recognition performance for Kinyarwanda.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.11863,
  title  = {KinSPEAK: Improving speech recognition for Kinyarwanda via semi-supervised learning methods},
  author = {Antoine Nzeyimana},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.11863},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

9 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:02:05.876Z