arXiv Computation and Language

Assessing the Reusability of Public Speech Resources for Low-Resource Languages: A Central Kurdish Case Study

The article reviews a recent Kurdish speech resource release that includes three voices, 35 hours of recorded speech, and a supporting paper. It finds several issues with the public files—mislisted equipment, unlabeled test data, and a coding error—while noting that the download page overstates the results and recommends a single voice for general use. The authors argue that these problems can largely be corrected with existing information, improving the resource’s usability for future work.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Unadapted Multilingual ASR on a Garrusi Kurdish Evaluation Set: A Common-Reference Staged Normalization Analysis

The paper evaluates a multilingual ASR model (MMS‑1B‑all) on a Garrusi Kurdish dataset using a common‑reference staged normalization approach. By normalizing both reference and hypothesis, the authors show that raw Arabic‑script hypotheses yield a 111.70 % WER, which drops to 97.85 % after folding into a reduced orthography, highlighting the impact of orthographic differences on error measurement. A Southern Kurdish fine‑tuned system performs worse, and residual errors are partly due to scoring‑pipeline limitations rather than recognition failures.

By Hiwa Asadpour
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

ufakzeka-kulak: Building and Evaluating a 31.6M-Parameter Turkish Speech Recognizer from Scratch

ufakzeka-kulak is an open Turkish speech‑to‑text model with 31.6 M parameters, built using a FastConformer encoder, a token‑and‑duration transducer (TDT), and a CTC head. It was trained from scratch on 4,977 hours of data—281 hours of human transcription and 4,696 hours of machine‑generated subtitles that were verified by a second reading—under licenses permitting commercial use. The model outputs cased, punctuated Turkish text with numbers written as words, achieving a normalised WER of 0.0921 on FLEURS Turkish and 0.0916 on Common Voice 27.0 Turkish, outperforming Whisper base and small models, and it is released under Apache‑2.0.

By Sait Furkan Teke (ufak AI)
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

TutlAit v1: a crowdsourced Moroccan Tamazight speech dataset with Arabic transcriptions and regional accent labels

The TutlAit v1 dataset is a crowdsourced corpus of Moroccan Tamazight speech paired with Modern Standard Arabic transcriptions and explicit regional accent labels. It contains 13,384 audio files (≈20.9 hours) collected via a web application, with volunteers contributing through text‑to‑audio and audio‑to‑text workflows, and includes additional segments from freely available media. The dataset covers Atlas, Souss, Rif, and Kabyle varieties, making it a valuable resource for speech recognition, translation, and accent identification in an under‑resourced language.

By Mohamed-Amine Chadi, Ezzahra Ait El Arbi, Ismail Khayoub, Aymane Fadili, Yassine Ennhili, Jadjigua Bouali, Hanane Inhid, Mohammed Ameksa, Hajar Mousannif
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

TRILOGUE: A Trilingual Spoken Dialogue Fact-Checking Benchmark with Evidence and Paired Audio

TRILOGUE is a new trilingual benchmark for spoken dialogue fact‑checking, covering English, Russian, and Kazakh. It includes almost 12,000 dialogues, 187,000 turns, and 390 hours of paired audio with ASR transcripts and word‑level timestamps, as well as nearly 5,000 human‑recorded Russian and Kazakh files. The dataset supports tasks such as claim check‑worthiness detection, evidence retrieval, and claim verification under various input conditions, and baseline experiments reveal challenges with ASR errors and cross‑lingual transfer, especially for Kazakh.

By Chaewan Chun, Meruyert Aristombayeva, Jiyoung Choi, Mahjabin Nahar, Delvin Ce Zhang, Dongwon Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Building and Evaluating Fixed-Voice Thai TTS from Synthetic Speech

The paper presents a method for creating a compact fixed‑voice Thai text‑to‑speech system by training a student model on synthetic speech generated from a large voice‑cloning teacher. By using only a short 15‑second voice reference and carefully filtering synthetic data, the authors build an 82‑million‑parameter model, Wayu‑Paxa‑TTS‑Edge, that runs on device without reference audio. The system achieves strong performance—68.2 % challenge‑set keyword accuracy, 91.4 % pause precision, and low character error rates—while outperforming its teacher and approaching the quality of a larger Gemini 3.1 model.

By Kunat Pipatanakul, Potsawee Manakul, Warit Sirichotedumrong, Sittipong Sripaisarnmongkol, Pakorn Nathong, Phatrasek Jirabovonvisut
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Building and Evaluating a Synthetic Bengali Speech Resource for Telecom Customer Care

The paper introduces a synthetic Bengali speech dataset tailored for telecom customer‑care applications, comprising 10,000 audio‑text pairs (≈26.82 hours) with predefined train, validation, and test splits. The data were generated using OmniVoice voice‑cloning, and include both original and normalized transcripts for ASR/STT use. Automatic intelligibility evaluation with a fine‑tuned Whisper model shows an average WER of 2.54% and CER of 0.59%, indicating strong text‑audio consistency, while the authors note limitations of synthetic speech and STT‑based evaluation.

By Kawshik Kumar Paul, Md. Nafiul Alam Fuji
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Lost in Speech: Trilingual Spoken Hallucination Detection Across Audio and Transcripts

The paper introduces a trilingual spoken hallucination detection benchmark covering English, Russian, and Kazakh news, with 12,013 samples that include synthetic alterations and severity levels, as well as 290 fact‑checked misinformation items. Detectors are evaluated in a reference‑free setting on text, ASR transcripts, and audio, revealing that most models underperform baseline classifiers, except Gemma‑3n on transcripts. Synthetic‑trained detectors achieve high macro‑F1 scores on real‑world misinformation, but Russian provenance analysis highlights model‑dependent signals that confound synthetic benchmarks.

By Meruyert Aristombayeva, Jason S. Lucas, Chaewan Chun, Dongwon Lee
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

GigaSpeech 3: Scaling Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Recognition with Weakly Labeled Data

GigaSpeech 3 is a new Arabic speech corpus comprising 39,000 hours and 10 million weakly transcribed segments across Algerian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Saudi, and Syrian dialects. It is built from 60 hours of manual transcription per dialect, using self‑supervised labeling models and noisy‑student refinement to produce high‑quality data. The corpus enables dialect‑specific and multi‑dialect speech recognition models that outperform existing third‑party systems, achieving a macro‑average word error rate of 23.86% for dialect‑specific models and 25.51% for a multi‑dialect model.

By Junzhe Liu, Yujie Tu, Yifan Yang, Peng Wang, Haoran Wang, Guodong Lin, Leyan Liao, Chengquan Zhang, Zhifu Gao, Xiangang Li, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Kai Yu, Xie Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Fine-Tuning Whisper for Automatic Speech Recognition in Baniwa: A Preliminary Study

The study fine‑tunes the Whisper Small model for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in Baniwa, an indigenous Arawakan language. Using a 0.54‑hour corpus of 1,373 manually transcribed recordings, the fine‑tuned model achieved a Word Error Rate of 37.5% and a Character Error Rate of 7.45%. These results provide an initial baseline for Baniwa ASR and suggest that multilingual foundation models can be adapted to extremely low‑resource languages.

By Leonardo Duart, Tiago Fonseca, Thiago Chac\'on