arXiv Computation and Language By Tim Wenjie Hu, Evelyn Nafula Ouma, Benjamin Akera, John A. Quinn

Group Relative Policy Optimisation Improves Multilingual Speech Recognition in Low-Resource Languages

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Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) is applied to a non‑LLM encoder‑decoder ASR model, Whisper‑large‑v3, to improve multilingual speech recognition across 51 African languages. The method mitigates exposure bias from teacher forcing, especially benefiting low‑resource and noisy audio scenarios. The resulting model, SunflowerASR, sets new macro‑averaged WER records on AfriVox‑v2 (0.227) and SimbaBench (0.372).

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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