Related papers: AfriVoices-KE: A Multilingual Speech Dataset for K…

The need for Question Answering datasets in low resource languages is the motivation of this research, leading to the development of Kencorpus Swahili Question Answering Dataset, KenSwQuAD. This dataset is annotated from raw story texts of…

Dialogue generation is an important NLP task fraught with many challenges. The challenges become more daunting for low-resource African languages. To enable the creation of dialogue agents for African languages, we contribute the first…

In the field of audio and speech analysis, the ability to identify emotions from acoustic signals is essential. Human-computer interaction (HCI) and behavioural analysis are only a few of the many areas where the capacity to distinguish…

Existing AI bias evaluation benchmarks largely reflect Western perspectives, leaving African contexts underrepresented and enabling harmful stereotypes in applications across various domains. To address this gap, we introduce AfriStereo,…

African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems --…

This paper introduces a high-quality open-source speech synthesis dataset for Kazakh, a low-resource language spoken by over 13 million people worldwide. The dataset consists of about 93 hours of transcribed audio recordings spoken by two…

Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from more than six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. These include 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research…

Creating speech datasets, models, and evaluation frameworks for low-resource languages remains challenging given the lack of a broad base of pertinent experience to draw from. This paper reports on the field collection of 612 hours of…

This study examines the digital representation of African languages and the challenges this presents for current language detection tools. We evaluate their performance on Yoruba, Kinyarwanda, and Amharic. While these languages are spoken…

Voice based technologies have the potential to bridge digital accessibility gaps; however, existing datasets fail to capture the linguistic and regional diversity of Indic languages. We present Project VAANI, a large scale multimodal…

We present improvements in automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Somali, a currently extremely under-resourced language. This forms part of a continuing United Nations (UN) effort to employ ASR-based keyword spotting systems to support…

In this study, we introduce YODAS (YouTube-Oriented Dataset for Audio and Speech), a large-scale, multilingual dataset comprising currently over 500k hours of speech data in more than 100 languages, sourced from both labeled and unlabeled…

We introduce a new dataset of conversational speech representing English from India, Nigeria, and the United States. The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues (MD3) strikes a new balance between open-ended conversational speech and…

The GPT-4o represents a significant milestone in enabling real-time interaction with large language models (LLMs) through speech, its remarkable low latency and high fluency not only capture attention but also stimulate research interest in…

The paper introduces and publicly releases (Data download link available after acceptance) CAFE -- the first Code-switching dataset between Algerian dialect, French, and english languages. The CAFE speech data is unique for (a) its…

Speech translation for Indian languages remains a challenging task due to the scarcity of large-scale, publicly available datasets that capture the linguistic diversity and domain coverage essential for real-world applications. Existing…

Current state of the art acoustic models can easily comprise more than 100 million parameters. This growing complexity demands larger training datasets to maintain a decent generalization of the final decision function. An ideal dataset is…

Bengali is spoken by over 230 million people yet remains severely under-served in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization research. In this paper, we present our system for the DL Sprint 4.0 Bengali Long-Form Speech…

Advances in speech and language technologies enable tools such as voice-search, text-to-speech, speech recognition and machine translation. These are however only available for high resource languages like English, French or Chinese.…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) performs well for high-resource languages with abundant paired audio-transcript data, but its accuracy degrades sharply for most languages due to limited publicly available aligned data. To this end, we…