We present DONDO, a family of open, permissively licensed automatic speech recognition (ASR) base models for African languages, built on the w2v-BERT 2. 0 self-supervised speech encoder.
arXiv:2608. 04586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success in speech-to-text translation (S2TT).
arXiv:2608. 04586v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success in speech-to-text translation (S2TT).
arXiv:2608. 07629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation models such as NLLB-200 cover 200 languages but leave thousands unsupported, including most Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon.
arXiv:2609.09554v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce BuzzASR, a collection of language-specialized fine-tuned Whisper models adapted for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in 102 languages. L...
arXiv:2607. 04814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale.
Manacá-1B is a 1.72‑billion‑parameter, open decoder‑only language model trained from scratch for Brazilian Portuguese, released with a fully containerized, reproducible training pipeline and complete logs. The authors evaluate it against nine open baselines on four Portuguese benchmarks, reporting standard errors and paired significance tests, and find that Manacá-1B outperforms smaller models on LAMBADA‑PT while remaining competitive on commonsense completion. They also uncover a tokenizer‑related evaluation pitfall that can drastically lower accuracy and provide a simple fix, releasing all code, logs, and corrected tokenizer for full reproducibility.
AfriSwitch is a 61.36‑hour, human‑transcribed benchmark of in‑the‑wild code‑switched speech covering 16 African languages and varieties, annotated with switch‑level English span tags, per‑utterance Code‑Mixing Index (CMI), and switch‑point counts. The corpus reveals that code‑switching behaviour varies widely across languages, with no single metric fully capturing how code‑switched a language is. Benchmarking five open and commercial multilingual ASR systems in a zero‑shot setting shows high word error rates, with the best system averaging 35.93% WER and none dropping below 24% on any language, indicating that Africa‑targeted training rather than model scale or nominal language coverage best predicts performance.
arXiv:2609.38574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are frequently proposed as a route to AI-powered services for African communities, but they are least reliable exactly where the...
arXiv:2607. 15232v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A tokenizer fixed at the start of pre-training allocates vocabulary in proportion to the pre-training corpus, reflecting the deployment priorities at that time.
NE‑BERT is a multilingual encoder trained on about 8.3 million sentences from nine Northeast Indian languages plus Hindi and English. Using weighted sampling and a custom SentencePiece tokenizer, it achieves significantly lower perplexity than IndicBERT‑V2, MuRIL, and mBERT, and improves tokenization fertility. The model also addresses vocabulary fragmentation in extremely low‑resource languages through aggressive upsampling, and its effectiveness is validated on part‑of‑speech tagging for three of the languages.
arXiv:2609.13151v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Leading multilingual speech recognition models like Whisper transcribe diverse, low-resource languages without language-specific training but are compu...
arXiv:2606. 12708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite their linguistic diversity and global significance, African languages remain underrepresented in research and resources to support NLP.