arXiv Computation and Language

Neyshekar: An Open Persian Read-Speech Corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition

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
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
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
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 23

Synthetic-to-Real Code-Switched ASR: A Spontaneous Nepali-English Podcast Benchmark

The paper introduces a new benchmark of 13,044 spontaneous Nepali‑English code‑switched podcast utterances, totaling 15.45 h, and evaluates a two‑stage synthetic‑to‑real adaptation framework for ASR. Stage 1 uses supervised fine‑tuning on 0.95 h of synthetic speech, reducing Mixed Error Rate from 23.40 % to 21.52 % and switch‑point error rate from 35.89 % to 28.77 %. Stage 2 applies Group Relative Policy Optimization with script and transcription rewards, yielding modest but statistically significant further improvements, particularly in English script confusion and switch‑point accuracy. The study also shows that an auxiliary script reward term offers no benefit beyond MER‑only optimization in this setting, and that the synthetic SFT provides the main cross‑domain transfer to spontaneous human speech.

By Firoj Paudel
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

SpeakPay: Domain-Adaptive LoRA Fine-Tuning of Whisper for Low-Resource Nepali Financial Speech Recognition

SpeakPay is a voice‑first digital wallet designed to make mobile payment apps in Nepal accessible to visually impaired users. The paper introduces NepFinSpeech‑403, a 403‑utterance Nepali financial voice command dataset, and demonstrates that fine‑tuning Whisper large‑v2 with LoRA reduces the Word Error Rate from 129.95% to 42.58% and improves Devanagari numeral recognition from 0.0% to 73.9%. Domain adaptation also boosts the Transaction Success Rate from 1.67% to 33.33%, with as few as 100 domain‑specific utterances halving the zero‑shot WER.

By Biraj Subedi