# The `Ir`oy`inSpeech Text Corpus: 24,905 Curated Yor`ub'a Sentences for Speech and Language Technology

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05366 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05366/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 1 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Marking Contour Tones in Yor`ub'a: A Typographic and Computational Proposal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38627/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

`Ir`oy`inSpeech is a 42-hour, 80-speaker Yor`ub'a read-speech corpus whose audio has been distributed by ELRA since 2024. This paper describes the release of its text component: 24,905 unique, hand-verified, tone-marked Yor`ub'a sentences (275,897 tokens; 15,687 types), curated in 2022 as recording prompts. Roughly 11,000 sentences were adapted from openly licensed news material; the remainder were written in-house to broaden coverage beyond the religious translation that dominates existing Yor`ub'a corpora. Every sentence was checked by hand for tone-mark accuracy, edited for read-aloud clarity and a neutral register, and localised so that non-Yor`ub'a personal and place names appear in Yor`ub'a form. Preparing the text for release surfaced systematic Unicode normalisation failures affecting more than 60% of lines (with precomposed and decomposed forms of the same letter co-occurring within single sentences) which we document and correct. The corpus supports diacritic restoration, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, TTS front-end development and orthographic research, and serves as a validated prompt set for new recording.