mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

BembaSpeech: A Speech Recognition Corpus for the Bemba Language

arXiv 2102.04889 ↗First posted 9 Feb 2021cs.CLcited by 14

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Abstract (arXiv)

We present a preprocessed, ready-to-use automatic speech recognition corpus, BembaSpeech, consisting over 24 hours of read speech in the Bemba language, a written but low-resourced language spoken by over 30% of the population in Zambia. To assess its usefulness for training and testing ASR systems for Bemba, we train an end-to-end Bemba ASR system by fine-tuning a pre-trained DeepSpeech English model on the training portion of the BembaSpeech corpus. Our best model achieves a word error rate (WER) of 54.78%. The results show that the corpus can be used for building ASR systems for Bemba. The corpus and models are publicly released at https://github.com/csikasote/BembaSpeech.

Key facts. Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 6 of its 50 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Feb 2021.

Builds on

6 of 50 references.

References · 6

  1. 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 36,960
  2. 2020wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representationscited by 3,853
  3. 2015Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarincited by 449
  4. 2014Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognitioncited by 354
  5. 2018The PyTorch-Kaldi Speech Recognition Toolkitcited by 38
  6. 2019Benchmarking Neural Machine Translation for Southern African Languagescited by 9

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 2; 2023: 2; 2024: 4; 2025: 4; 2026: 2.

14 papers.

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  1. 2023Zambezi Voice: A Multilingual Speech Corpus for Zambian Languagescited by 18
  2. 2024The Zeno's Paradox of `Low-Resource' Languagescited by 12
  3. 2024Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yor`ub'a Regional Dialectscited by 11
  4. 2023BIG-C: a Multimodal Multi-Purpose Dataset for Bembacited by 9
  5. 2024Africa-Centric Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Multilingual Speech Representation in a Sub-Saharan Contextcited by 8
  6. 2022Investigating data partitioning strategies for crosslinguistic low-resource ASR evaluationcited by 6
  7. 2022Large vocabulary speech recognition for languages of Africa: multilingual modeling and self-supervised learningcited by 5
  8. 2024Toward Practical Automatic Speech Recognition and Post-Processing: a Call for Explainable Error Benchmark Guidelinecited by 4
  9. 2025Voice of a Continent: Mapping Africa's Speech Technology Frontiercited by 4
  10. 2025Breaking the Transcription Bottleneck: Fine-tuning ASR Models for Extremely Low-Resource Fieldwork Languagescited by 3
  11. 2025Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for African Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 2
  12. 2026Sylber 2.0: A Universal Syllable Embeddingcited by 2
2 more
  1. 2025Bemba Speech Translation: Exploring a Low-Resource African Languagecited by 1
  2. 2026AfriVoices-KE: A Multilingual Speech Dataset for Kenyan Languagescited by 0