csikasote/BembaSpeech

This is an ASR corpus for Bemba language. It contains read speech from diverse publicly available Bemba sources; Literature Books, Radio/TV shows transcripts, Youtube Video transcripts, Online sources. The corpus has 14, 438 utterances culminating into over 24 hours of speech. ## BembaSpeech: a Speech Recognition Corpus for the Bemba Language ### 1. Introduction ---------------------- BembaSpeech is an ASR corpus for the Bemba language of Zambia. It contains read speech from diverse publicly available Bemba sources; literature books, radio/TV shows transcripts, Youtube video transcripts as well as various open online sources. Its purpose is to enable the training and testing of automatic speech recognition(ASR) systems in Bemba language. The corpus has 14, 438 utterances culminating into 24.5 hours of speech data. All signal files are encoded in Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE) from a mono recording with a sample rate of 16K Hz. The corpus is split into three parts: * training set - of approximately 20 hours of speech * development set- of approximately 2.5 hours of speech * testing set - of approximately 2 hours of speech ### 2. Structure ---------------- The repository is structured as follows: BembaSpeech ├── bem │ ├── audio/* │   ├── dev.csv │   ├── test.csv │   └── train.csv ├── Data Statement.md ├── README.md └── speaker_info.txt ### 3. Citation ------------------------ If you use this speech dataset in your project or research, please consider citing as follows: @InProceedings{sikasote-anastasopoulos:2022:LREC, author = {Sikasote, Claytone and Anastasopoulos, Antonios}, title = {BembaSpeech: A Speech Recognition Corpus for the Bemba Language}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference}, month = {June}, year = {2022}, address = {Marseille, France}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association}, pages = {7277--7283}, abstract = {We present a preprocessed, ready-to-use automatic speech recognition corpus, BembaSpeech, consisting over 24 hours of read speech in the Bemba language, a written but low-resourced language spoken by over 30\% of the population in Zambia. To assess its usefulness for training and testing ASR systems …