# Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbr"ucken Dialect Speech Corpus

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11803/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [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)
- [XTTS: a Massively Multilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04904/) (2024)
- [StyleTTS 2: Towards Human-Level Text-to-Speech through Style Diffusion and Adversarial Training with Large Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07691/) (2023)
- [MASSIVE: A 1M-Example Multilingual Natural Language Understanding Dataset with 51 Typologically-Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08582/) (2022)
- [VoxLingua107: a Dataset for Spoken Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12998/) (2020)
- [One Country, 700+ Languages: NLP Challenges for Underrepresented Languages and Dialects in Indonesia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13357/) (2022)
- [DIALECTBENCH: A NLP Benchmark for Dialects, Varieties, and Closely-Related Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11009/) (2024)
- [Towards Robust Speech Representation Learning for Thousands of Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00837/) (2024)
- [AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00274/) (2023)
- [What a Creole Wants, What a Creole Needs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00437/) (2022)
- [What Do Dialect Speakers Want? A Survey of Attitudes Towards Language Technology for German Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11968/) (2024)
- [Arabic natural language processing: An overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02784/) (2019)
- [AccentDB: A Database of Non-Native English Accents to Assist Neural Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07973/) (2020)
- [AfriHuBERT: A self-supervised speech representation model for African languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20201/) (2024)
- [Swiss Parliaments Corpus, an Automatically Aligned Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02810/) (2020)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [CML-TTS A Multilingual Dataset for Speech Synthesis in Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10097/) (2023)
- [ZMM-TTS: Zero-shot Multilingual and Multispeaker Speech Synthesis Conditioned on Self-supervised Discrete Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14398/) (2023)
- [FLEURS-R: A Restored Multilingual Speech Corpus for Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06227/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Discriminate Against Speakers of German Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13835/) (2025)
- [Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yor`ub'a Regional Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19564/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Pixel Language Models on Non-Standardized Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09084/) (2024)
- [Task-Agnostic Low-Rank Adapters for Unseen English Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00915/) (2023)
- [Meta Learning Text-to-Speech Synthesis in over 7000 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06403/) (2024)
- [MaiBaam: A Multi-Dialectal Bavarian Universal Dependency Treebank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10293/) (2024)
- [A Multi-Dialectal Dataset for German Dialect ASR and Dialect-to-Standard Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02894/) (2025)
- [NADI 2025: The First Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02038/) (2025)
- [Improving Dialectal Slot and Intent Detection with Auxiliary Tasks: A Multi-Dialectal Bavarian Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03863/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Natural language processing (NLP) and speech technologies have made significant progress in recent years; however, they remain largely focused on standardized language varieties. Dialects, despite their cultural significance and widespread use, are underrepresented in linguistic resources and computational models, resulting in performance disparities. To address this gap, we introduce Saar-Voice, a six-hour speech corpus for the Saarbr"ucken dialect of German. The dataset was created by first collecting text through digitized books and locally sourced materials. A subset of this text was recorded by nine speakers, and we conducted analyses on both the textual and speech components to assess the dataset's characteristics and quality. We discuss methodological challenges related to orthographic and speaker variation, and explore grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion. The resulting corpus provides aligned textual and audio representations. This serves as a foundation for future research on dialect-aware text-to-speech (TTS), particularly in low-resource scenarios, including zero-shot and few-shot model adaptation.
