Abstract
The advancement of speech technologies has been remarkable, yet its integration with African languages remains limited due to the scarcity of African speech corpora. To address this issue, we present AfroDigits, a minimalist, community-driven dataset of spoken digits for African languages, currently covering 38 African languages. As a demonstration of the practical applications of AfroDigits, we conduct audio digit classification experiments on six African languages [Igbo (ibo), Yoruba (yor), Rundi (run), Oshiwambo (kua), Shona (sna), and Oromo (gax)] using the Wav2Vec2.0-Large and XLS-R models. Our experiments reveal a useful insight on the effect of mixing African speech corpora during finetuning. AfroDigits is the first published audio digit dataset for African languages and we believe it will, among other things, pave the way for Afro-centric speech applications such as the recognition of telephone numbers, and street numbers. We release the dataset and platform publicly at this https URL and this https URL respectively.
Abstract (translated)
语音技术的发展引人注目,但与非洲语言的融合仍然受到限制,因为非洲语音 corpora 的稀缺性。为了解决这个问题,我们提出了Afr计分系统,这是一个专注于非洲语言的语音数字数据集,目前涵盖了38种非洲语言。为了展示Afr计分系统的实用应用,我们进行了六种非洲语言的语音数字分类实验,使用WAV2Vec2.0-Large和Xls-R模型。我们的实验揭示了混合非洲语音 corpora 的效果在微调期间的重要性。Afr计分系统是非洲语言的首次发表语音数字数据集,我们相信它将有助于开辟非洲语言为中心的语音应用,如电话号码和街道号码的识别。我们将公开发布数据集和平台,分别位于这两个httpsURL。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12582
