mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Sagalee: an Open Source Automatic Speech Recognition Dataset for Oromo Language

arXiv 2502.00421 ↗First posted 1 Feb 2025cs.CL cs.SD eess.AScited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

We present a novel Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset for the Oromo language, a widely spoken language in Ethiopia and neighboring regions. The dataset was collected through a crowd-sourcing initiative, encompassing a diverse range of speakers and phonetic variations. It consists of 100 hours of real-world audio recordings paired with transcriptions, covering read speech in both clean and noisy environments. This dataset addresses the critical need for ASR resources for the Oromo language which is underrepresented. To show its applicability for the ASR task, we conducted experiments using the Conformer model, achieving a Word Error Rate (WER) of 15.32% with hybrid CTC and AED loss and WER of 18.74% with pure CTC loss. Additionally, fine-tuning the Whisper model resulted in a significantly improved WER of 10.82%. These results establish baselines for Oromo ASR, highlighting both the challenges and the potential for improving ASR performance in Oromo. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/turinaf/sagalee and we encourage its use for further research and development in Oromo speech processing.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 15 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2025.

Builds on

15 of 27 references.

References · 15

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2022Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervisioncited by 4,057
  3. 2015Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Unitscited by 2,918
  4. 2020Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognitioncited by 1,863
  5. 2019SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognitioncited by 1,380
  6. 2017Searching for Activation Functionscited by 169
  7. 2021WeNet: Production oriented Streaming and Non-streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition Toolkitcited by 125
  8. 2019Effectiveness of self-supervised pre-training for speech recognitioncited by 72
  9. 2024Automatic Speech Recognition using Advanced Deep Learning Approaches: A surveycited by 50
  10. 2019Improving sequence-to-sequence speech recognition training with on-the-fly data augmentationcited by 29
  11. 2022A Survey of Multilingual Models for Automatic Speech Recognitioncited by 21
  12. 2021On-the-Fly Aligned Data Augmentation for Sequence-to-Sequence ASRcited by 9
3 more
  1. 2023Knowledge Distillation from Multiple Foundation Models for End-to-End Speech Recognitioncited by 8
  2. 2021Crowdsourcing Parallel Corpus for English-Oromo Neural Machine Translation using Community Engagement Platformcited by 4
  3. 2023Stable Distillation: Regularizing Continued Pre-training for Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognitioncited by 2

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

  1. 2026Ethio-ASR: Joint Multilingual Speech Recognition and Language Identification for Ethiopian Languagescited by 2