Related papers: Improved low-resource Somali speech recognition by…

We present our first efforts in building an automatic speech recognition system for Somali, an under-resourced language, using 1.57 hrs of annotated speech for acoustic model training. The system is part of an ongoing effort by the United…

We present an analysis of semi-supervised acoustic and language model training for English-isiZulu code-switched ASR using soap opera speech. Approximately 11 hours of untranscribed multilingual speech was transcribed automatically using…

This paper describes the results of an informal collaboration launched during the African Master of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) in June 2020. After a series of lectures and labs on speech data collection using mobile applications and on…

This paper presents recent progress in the acoustic modelling of under-resourced code-switched (CS) speech in multiple South African languages. We consider two approaches. The first constructs separate bilingual acoustic models…

ASR has achieved remarkable global progress, yet African low-resource languages remain rigorously underrepresented, producing barriers to digital inclusion across the continent with more than +2000 languages. This systematic literature…

In the FAME! project, we aim to develop an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for Frisian-Dutch code-switching (CS) speech extracted from the archives of a local broadcaster with the ultimate goal of building a spoken document…

This paper reports on the semi-supervised development of acoustic and language models for under-resourced, code-switched speech in five South African languages. Two approaches are considered. The first constructs four separate bilingual…

We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is crucial for human-machine interaction in diverse applications like conversational agents, industrial robotics, call center automation, and automated subtitling. However, developing high-performance ASR…

Although many Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have been developed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA), few studies have focused on dialect-specific implementations, particularly for low-resource Arabic…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages remains constrained by limited labeled data and the lack of systematic guidance on model selection, data scaling, and decoding strategies. Large pre-trained systems such as Whisper,…

In this paper, we present our overall efforts to improve the performance of a code-switching speech recognition system using semi-supervised training methods from lexicon learning to acoustic modeling, on the South East Asian…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) plays a vital role in enabling natural human-machine interaction across applications such as virtual assistants, industrial automation, customer support, and real-time transcription. However, developing…

While massively multilingual speech models like wav2vec 2.0 XLSR-128 can be directly fine-tuned for automatic speech recognition (ASR), downstream performance can still be relatively poor on languages that are under-represented in the…

In recent years, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have significantly improved, especially in languages with a vast amount of transcribed speech data. However, ASR systems tend to perform poorly for low-resource languages with…

We present a novel Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset for the Oromo language, a widely spoken language in Ethiopia and neighboring regions. The dataset was collected through a crowd-sourcing initiative, encompassing a diverse range…

Building automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is a challenging task, especially for under-resourced languages that need to construct corpora nearly from scratch and lack sufficient training data. It has emerged that several African…

Semi-supervised training (SST) is a common approach to leverage untranscribed/unlabeled speech data to improve automatic speech recognition performance in low-resource languages. However, if the available unlabeled speech is mismatched to…

Sequence-to-sequence automatic speech recognition (ASR) models require large quantities of data to attain high performance. For this reason, there has been a recent surge in interest for unsupervised and semi-supervised training in such…

It is important to transcribe and archive speech data of endangered languages for preserving heritages of verbal culture and automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a powerful tool to facilitate this process. However, since endangered…