# The Makerere Radio Speech Corpus: A Luganda Radio Corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.09790 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09790/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04624/) (2021)
- [Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.5567/) (2014)
- [NeMo: a toolkit for building AI applications using Neural Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09577/) (2019)
- [ESPnet-se: end-to-end speech enhancement and separation toolkit designed for asr integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03706/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14465/) (2020)
- [OkwuGb'e: End-to-End Speech Recognition for Fon and Igbo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07762/) (2021)
- [Fast ASR-free and almost zero-resource keyword spotting using DTW and CNNs for humanitarian monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09374/) (2018)
- [What shall we do with an hour of data? Speech recognition for the un- and under-served languages of Common Voice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04674/) (2021)
- [Automatic Speech Recognition for Humanitarian Applications in Somali](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08669/) (2018)
- [Keyword Spotter Model for Crop Pest and Disease Monitoring from Community Radio Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02292/) (2019)
- [Identifying and Mitigating Gender Bias in Hyperbolic Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13767/) (2021)
- [Crowdsourcing real-time viral disease and pest information. A case of nation-wide cassava disease surveillance in a developing country](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04237/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [When Is Multilinguality a Curse? Language Modeling for 250 High- and Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09205/) (2023)
- [Goldfish: Monolingual Language Models for 350 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10441/) (2024)
- [Zambezi Voice: A Multilingual Speech Corpus for Zambian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04428/) (2023)
- [Kencorpus: A Kenyan Language Corpus of Swahili, Dholuo and Luhya for Natural Language Processing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12081/) (2022)
- [Phonemic Representation and Transcription for Speech to Text Applications for Under-resourced Indigenous African Languages: The Case of Kiswahili](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16537/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Building a usable radio monitoring automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is a challenging task for under-resourced languages and yet this is paramount in societies where radio is the main medium of public communication and discussions. Initial efforts by the United Nations in Uganda have proved how understanding the perceptions of rural people who are excluded from social media is important in national planning. However, these efforts are being challenged by the absence of transcribed speech datasets. In this paper, The Makerere Artificial Intelligence research lab releases a Luganda radio speech corpus of 155 hours. To our knowledge, this is the first publicly available radio dataset in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper describes the development of the voice corpus and presents baseline Luganda ASR performance results using Coqui STT toolkit, an open source speech recognition toolkit.