# Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Quechua ASR Improvement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.06872 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06872/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10135/) (2017)
- [ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10697/) (2021)
- [Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02595/) (2015)
- [OpenNMT: Open-source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03815/) (2017)
- [Contextual Augmentation: Data Augmentation by Words with Paradigmatic Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06201/) (2018)
- [QANet: Combining Local Convolution with Global Self-Attention for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09541/) (2018)
- [End-to-end ASR: from Supervised to Semi-Supervised Learning with Modern Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08460/) (2019)
- [Transformer-based Acoustic Modeling for Hybrid Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09799/) (2019)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Data Augmentation for Dialogue Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01554/) (2018)
- [Improving RNN Transducer Modeling for End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12415/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Better Pseudo-labeling with Multi-ASR Fusion and Error Correction by SpeechLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11089/) (2025)
- [Text Generation with Speech Synthesis for ASR Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16333/) (2023)
- [An Exhaustive Evaluation of TTS- and VC-based Data Augmentation for ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08954/) (2025)
- [Frustratingly Easy Data Augmentation for Low-Resource ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15373/) (2025)
- [Automatic Speech Recognition Advancements for Indigenous Languages of the Americas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08368/) (2024)
- [Indigenous Languages Spoken in Argentina: A Survey of NLP and Speech Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09943/) (2025)
- [Giving Voice to the Constitution: Low-Resource Text-to-Speech for Quechua and Spanish Using a Bilingual Legal Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13288/) (2026)
- [LuxSQA: Ask Me in Luxembourgish with TTS-Augmented Spoken Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02763/) (2026)
- [Error Rate is Not Enough: Costs of Augmentation in Low-Resource ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13807/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a key element in new services that helps users to interact with an automated system. Deep learning methods have made it possible to deploy systems with word error rates below 5% for ASR of English. However, the use of these methods is only available for languages with hundreds or thousands of hours of audio and their corresponding transcriptions. For the so-called low-resource languages to speed up the availability of resources that can improve the performance of their ASR systems, methods of creating new resources on the basis of existing ones are being investigated. In this paper we describe our data augmentation approach to improve the results of ASR models for low-resource and agglutinative languages. We carry out experiments developing an ASR for Quechua using the wav2letter++ model. We reduced WER by 8.73% through our approach to the base model. The resulting ASR model obtained 22.75% WER and was trained with 99 hours of original resources and 99 hours of synthetic data obtained with a combination of text augmentation and synthetic speech generati