Chesia-Anyika/Dholuo-Automatic-Speech-Recognition-ASR-Project

This is an individual Natural Language Processing (NLP) project focused on developing an end-to-end speech recognition tool for the low-resource Dholuo language using OpenAI’s Whisper model. # 💬 Dholuo Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Project *Empowering Low-Resource Language Access with Whisper | NLP + Web App Development* ## 📍 Nairobi, Kenya | Sept 2025 – Ongoing --- ## 🧠 Overview This is an **individual NLP research project** focused on building an **end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tool** for **Dholuo**, a low-resource language spoken in Kenya. The system is powered by **OpenAI’s Whisper model**, fine-tuned to better understand Dholuo phonetics and vocabulary. > 🗣️ The project aims to enhance **language accessibility**, **education**, and **digital documentation** for underrepresented African languages. --- ## 🎯 Key Objectives - 📥 Collect & preprocess **Dholuo speech data** using Mozilla Common Voice - 🧽 Normalize and clean transcription data (tokenization, casing, punctuation) - 🔧 Fine-tune **Whisper** via transfer learning for Dholuo-specific ASR - 📊 Evaluate model accuracy with **WER** & **CER** - 🌐 Deploy a live **Streamlit web app** for transcription - 🧪 Provide a **Gradio prototype** for real-time testing --- ## 🛠️ Tech Stack & Tools | Task | Tools / Frameworks | |--------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------| | Data Collection | `Mozilla Common Voice`, `Python scripts` | | Preprocessing | `NLTK`, `NumPy`, `re`, `Whisper-compatible text cleaning` | | Model Training | `Whisper`, `Google Colab`, `PyTorch`, `Transfer Learning` | | Prototyping | `Gradio`, `Streamlit` | | Evaluation | `WER`, `CER`, `scikit-learn`, `JiWER` | --- ## 📂 Project Structure ``` dholuo-asr/ │ ├── 1. ASR Project: Filtering ASR tsv files/ ├── 2. ASR Project - File Conversion/ ├── 3. ASR Projects - Mapping & Filtering/ ├── 4. ASR Project - Preprocessing/ ├── 5. ASR Project - Training/ └── README.md ``` --- ## 🔄 …