arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 23

WaxalNet: Benchmarking and Adapting Speech Recognition for Spontaneous Speech in 19 African Languages

The paper introduces WaxalNet, a benchmark and adaptation study for spontaneous speech recognition across 19 African languages using the WAXAL corpus. It evaluates zero‑shot and fine‑tuned performance of several multilingual foundation models (Whisper, MMS, Omnilingual ASR, SeamlessM4T‑v2), showing that fine‑tuning can substantially reduce word error rates and that LLM decoders generally outperform CTC decoders when the encoder is shared. The authors also demonstrate that a single multilingual model can serve all languages with only a modest WER penalty and provide a native‑speaker audit of failure modes.

By Victor Tolulope Olufemi, Oreoluwa Babatunde, Ramsey Njema, Bolarinwa Gbotemi, Wanchi Lucia Yen, John Uzodinma, Sunday Ajayi, Oluwademilade Williams, Kausar Moshood, Innocent Elendu Anyaele, Akebert Arefaine, Candace Hunzwi, Wongel Dawit Daniel, Emmilly Namuganga, Cleophas Kadima, Athanase Bahizire, Onitsiky Ranaivoson, Emmanuel Aaron, Nicholaus Ladislaus, Idris Muhammed, Jonathan Enoch Simenya, Martin Koome, Matewos Tegete Endaylalu, Peter Ifeoluwa Adeyemo, Hondi Prisca Birindwa, Ukachi Agnes Eze-Mbey, Yacoba Oduro-Yeboah, Pericles Adjovi, Mikel K. Ngueajio, Toluwani Aremu, Prasenjit Mitra
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Vimarsha: Faithful ASR Evaluation for Indian Languages with Demographic Diversity, In-the-Wild Audio and Spelling Variations

arXiv:2609.24199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation benchmarks for Indian language automatic speech recognition (ASR) suffer from two systematic biases: optimistic scores from clean, controlle...

By Kaushal Santosh Bhogale, Srija Anand, Sadakopa Ramakrishnan Thothathiri, Tahir Javed, Sshubam Verma, Mitesh M. Khapra
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Beyond Word Error Rate: A Switch Aware Evaluation of ASR and Audio Language Models on English Yoruba Code-Switched Speech

arXiv:2609. 11786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and audio language models (audio LMs) now report low error rates on monolingual benchmarks, but their behavior on code switched speech in low resource, diacritic rich languages remains poorly characterized.

By Chibuzor Okocha, Christan Earl Grant
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