mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

`Ir`oy`inSpeech: A multi-purpose Yor`ub'a Speech Corpus

arXiv 2307.16071 ↗First posted 29 Jul 2023cs.CL cs.SD eess.AScited by 7

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Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce `Ir`oy`inSpeech, a new corpus influenced by the desire to increase the amount of high quality, contemporary Yor`ub'a speech data, which can be used for both Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks. We curated about 23000 text sentences from news and creative writing domains with the open license CC-BY-4.0. To encourage a participatory approach to data creation, we provide 5000 curated sentences to the Mozilla Common Voice platform to crowd-source the recording and validation of Yor`ub'a speech data. In total, we created about 42 hours of speech data recorded by 80 volunteers in-house, and 6 hours of validated recordings on Mozilla Common Voice platform. Our TTS evaluation suggests that a high-fidelity, general domain, single-speaker Yor`ub'a voice is possible with as little as 5 hours of speech. Similarly, for ASR we obtained a baseline word error rate (WER) of 23.8.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 8 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2023.

Builds on

8 of 36 references.

References · 8

  1. 2020Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognitioncited by 1,863
  2. 2019Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpuscited by 1,384
  3. 2021XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scalecited by 601
  4. 2022FLEURS: Few-shot Learning Evaluation of Universal Representations of Speechcited by 469
  5. 2023Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languagescited by 411
  6. 2021The Effect of Domain and Diacritics in Yor`ub'a-English Neural Machine Translationcited by 38
  7. 2022MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognitioncited by 38
  8. 2022BibleTTS: a large, high-fidelity, multilingual, and uniquely African speech corpuscited by 32

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 4; 2026: 1.

7 papers.

  1. 2025Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Aheadcited by 16
  2. 2024Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yor`ub'a Regional Dialectscited by 11
  3. 2023Findings of the 2023 ML-SUPERB Challenge: Pre-Training and Evaluation over More Languages and Beyondcited by 10
  4. 2025Bridging Gaps in Natural Language Processing for Yor`ub'a: A Systematic Review of a Decade of Progress and Prospectscited by 2
  5. 2025Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for African Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 2
  6. 2026AfriVoices-KE: A Multilingual Speech Dataset for Kenyan Languagescited by 1
  7. 2025Speech to Speech Translation with Translatotron: A State of the Art Reviewcited by 0