mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

AfroDigits: A Community-Driven Spoken Digit Dataset for African Languages

arXiv 2303.12582 ↗First posted 22 Mar 2023cs.CLcited by 4

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

The advancement of speech technologies has been remarkable, yet its integration with African languages remains limited due to the scarcity of African speech corpora. To address this issue, we present AfroDigits, a minimalist, community-driven dataset of spoken digits for African languages, currently covering 38 African languages. As a demonstration of the practical applications of AfroDigits, we conduct audio digit classification experiments on six African languages [Igbo (ibo), Yoruba (yor), Rundi (run), Oshiwambo (kua), Shona (sna), and Oromo (gax)] using the Wav2Vec2.0-Large and XLS-R models. Our experiments reveal a useful insight on the effect of mixing African speech corpora during finetuning. AfroDigits is the first published audio digit dataset for African languages and we believe it will, among other things, pave the way for Afro-centric speech applications such as the recognition of telephone numbers, and street numbers. We release the dataset and platform publicly at https://huggingface.co/datasets/chrisjay/crowd-speech-africa and https://huggingface.co/spaces/chrisjay/afro-speech respectively.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 34 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2023.

Builds on

34 of 60 references.

References · 34

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 36,960
  3. 2014ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challengecited by 8,441
  4. 2018Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Codingcited by 7,662
  5. 2022Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervisioncited by 3,972
  6. 2020wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representationscited by 3,853
  7. 2019HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processingcited by 2,201
  8. 2019Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpuscited by 1,358
  9. 2022No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translationcited by 1,290
  10. 2020The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP Worldcited by 789
  11. 2021XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scalecited by 589
  12. 2020Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translationcited by 559
22 more
  1. 2020Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning for Speech Recognitioncited by 496
  2. 2019Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervisioncited by 462
  3. 2019Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild: Findings and Challengescited by 253
  4. 2021Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasetscited by 241
  5. 2016Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translationcited by 188
  6. 2020Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languagescited by 159
  7. 2021MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languagescited by 155
  8. 2021Robust wav2vec 2.0: Analyzing Domain Shift in Self-Supervised Pre-Trainingcited by 148
  9. 2020Unsupervised pretraining transfers well across languagescited by 100
  10. 2022A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translationcited by 97
  11. 2021SpeechStew: Simply Mix All Available Speech Recognition Data to Train One Large Neural Networkcited by 83
  12. 2020Language ID in the Wild: Unexpected Challenges on the Path to a Thousand-Language Web Text Corpuscited by 76
  13. 2020Continuous speech separation: dataset and analysiscited by 73
  14. 2020Mapping Languages: The Corpus of Global Language Usecited by 42
  15. 2022AfroLID: A Neural Language Identification Tool for African Languagescited by 38
  16. 2015Transfer Learning for Speech and Language Processingcited by 35
  17. 2022Data Governance in the Age of Large-Scale Data-Driven Language Technologycited by 32
  18. 2022BibleTTS: a large, high-fidelity, multilingual, and uniquely African speech corpuscited by 31
  19. 2019Towards Standardization of Data Licenses: The Montreal Data Licensecited by 19
  20. 2021OkwuGb'e: End-to-End Speech Recognition for Fon and Igbocited by 13
  21. 2020Lanfrica: A Participatory Approach to Documenting Machine Translation Research on African Languagescited by 7
  22. 2021Learning Nigerian accent embeddings from speech: preliminary results based on SautiDB-Naija corpuscited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 3.

4 papers.

  1. 2024State of NLP in Kenya: A Surveycited by 7
  2. 2025The Esethu Framework: Reimagining Sustainable Dataset Governance and Curation for Low-Resource Languagescited by 4
  3. 2025Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for African Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 2
  4. 2025The African Languages Lab: A Collaborative Approach to Advancing Low-Resource African NLPcited by 0