# The Faetar Benchmark: Speech Recognition in a Very Under-Resourced Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08103 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08103/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2024.

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

- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [ESPnet: End-to-End Speech Processing Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00015/) (2018)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [FLEURS: Few-shot Learning Evaluation of Universal Representations of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12446/) (2022)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [Google USM: Scaling Automatic Speech Recognition Beyond 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01037/) (2023)
- [Powerset multi-class cross entropy loss for neural speaker diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13025/) (2023)
- [mHuBERT-147: A Compact Multilingual HuBERT Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06371/) (2024)
- [IndicSUPERB: A Speech Processing Universal Performance Benchmark for Indian languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11761/) (2022)
- [A Crowdsourced Open-Source Kazakh Speech Corpus and Initial Speech Recognition Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10334/) (2020)
- [Combining Spectral and Self-Supervised Features for Low Resource Speech Recognition and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02470/) (2022)
- [Findings of the 2023 ML-SUPERB Challenge: Pre-Training and Evaluation over More Languages and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05513/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce the Faetar Automatic Speech Recognition Benchmark, a benchmark corpus designed to push the limits of current approaches to low-resource speech recognition. Faetar, a Franco-Provenccal variety spoken primarily in Italy, has no standard orthography, has virtually no existing textual or speech resources other than what is included in the benchmark, and is quite different from other forms of Franco-Provenccal. The corpus comes from field recordings, most of which are noisy, for which only 5 hrs have matching transcriptions, and for which forced alignment is of variable quality. The corpus contains an additional 20 hrs of unlabelled speech. We report baseline results from state-of-the-art multilingual speech foundation models with a best phone error rate of 30.4%, using a pipeline that continues pre-training on the foundation model using the unlabelled set.