# Fotheidil: an Automatic Transcription System for the Irish Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00509 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00509/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Marian: Fast Neural Machine Translation in C++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00344/) (2018)
- [Pushing the Limits of Semi-Supervised Learning for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10504/) (2020)
- [Improved Noisy Student Training for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09629/) (2020)
- [FLEURS-R: A Restored Multilingual Speech Corpus for Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06227/) (2024)
- [Improving Low-Resource Speech Recognition with Pretrained Speech Models: Continued Pretraining vs. Semi-Supervised Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00659/) (2022)
- [Towards dialect-inclusive recognition in a low-resource language: are balanced corpora the answer?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07295/) (2023)
- [Semi-supervised Learning for Code-Switching ASR with Large Language Model Filter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04219/) (2024)
- [Low-resource speech recognition and dialect identification of Irish in a multi-task framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01293/) (2024)
- [Improving noisy student training for low-resource languages in End-to-End ASR using CycleGAN and inter-domain losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21061/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Adaptive Fisher-Whitened Cross-Covariance for Low-Resource Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29800/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper sets out the first web-based transcription system for the Irish language - Fotheidil, a system that utilises speech-related AI technologies as part of the ABAIR initiative. The system includes both off-the-shelf pre-trained voice activity detection and speaker diarisation models and models trained specifically for Irish automatic speech recognition and capitalisation and punctuation restoration. Semi-supervised learning is explored to improve the acoustic model of a modular TDNN-HMM ASR system, yielding substantial improvements for out-of-domain test sets and dialects that are underrepresented in the supervised training set. A novel approach to capitalisation and punctuation restoration involving sequence-to-sequence models is compared with the conventional approach using a classification model. Experimental results show here also substantial improvements in performance. The system will be made freely available for public use, and represents an important resource to researchers and others who transcribe Irish language materials. Human-corrected transcriptions will be collected and included in the training dataset as the system is used, which should lead to incremental improvements to the ASR model in a cyclical, community-driven fashion.