Large Vocabulary Read Speech Corpora for Four Ethiopian Languages: Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo and Wolaytta

Solomon Teferra Abate, Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Michael Melese, Hafte Abera, Tewodros Abebe, Wondwossen Mulugeta, Yaregal Assabie, Million Meshesha, Solomon Afnafu, Binyam Ephrem Seyoum

Abstract
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one of the most important technologies to support spoken communication in modern life. However, its development benefits from large speech corpus. The development of such a corpus is expensive and most of the human languages, including the Ethiopian languages, do not have such resources. To address this problem, we have developed four large (about 22 hours) speech corpora for four Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo and Wolaytta. To assess usability of the corpora for (the purpose of) speech processing, we have developed ASR systems for each language. In this paper, we present the corpora and the baseline ASR systems we have developed. We have achieved word error rates (WERs) of 37.65%, 31.03%, 38.02%, 33.89% for Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo and Wolaytta, respectively. This results show that the corpora are suitable for further investigation towards the development of ASR systems. Thus, the research community can use the corpora to further improve speech processing systems. From our results, it is clear that the collection of text corpora to train strong language models for all of the languages is still required, especially for Oromo and Wolaytta.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.513
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4167–4171
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.513
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Solomon Teferra Abate, Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Michael Melese, Hafte Abera, Tewodros Abebe, Wondwossen Mulugeta, Yaregal Assabie, Million Meshesha, Solomon Afnafu, and Binyam Ephrem Seyoum. 2020. Large Vocabulary Read Speech Corpora for Four Ethiopian Languages: Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo and Wolaytta. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4167–4171, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Large Vocabulary Read Speech Corpora for Four Ethiopian Languages: Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo and Wolaytta (Abate et al., LREC 2020)
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