The Esethu Framework: Reimagining Sustainable Dataset Governance and Curation for Low-Resource Languages
Jenalea Rajab, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Everlyn Asiko Chimoto, Dale Dunbar, Graham Morrissey, Fadel Thior, Luandrie Potgieter, Jessica Ojo, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Wilhelmina NdapewaOnyothi Nekoto, Pelonomi Moiloa, Jade Abbott, Vukosi Marivate, Benjamin Rosman
Abstract
This paper presents the Esethu Framework, a sustainable data curation framework specifically designed to empower local communities and ensure equitable benefit-sharing from their linguistic resource. This framework is supported by the Esethu license, a novel community-centric data license. As a proof of concept, we introduce the Vuk’uzenzele isiXhosa Speech Dataset (ViXSD), an open-source corpus developed under the Esethu Framework and License. The dataset, containing read speech from native isiXhosa speakers enriched with demographic and linguistic metadata, demonstrates how community-driven licensing and curation principles can bridge resource gaps in automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages while safeguarding the interests of data creators. We describe the framework guiding dataset development, outline the Esethu license provisions, present the methodology for ViXSD, and present ASR experiments validating ViXSD’s usability in building and refining voice-driven applications for isiXhosa.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.acl-long.1487
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Vienna, Austria
- Editors:
- Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 30763–30776
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1487/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Jenalea Rajab, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Everlyn Asiko Chimoto, Dale Dunbar, Graham Morrissey, Fadel Thior, Luandrie Potgieter, Jessica Ojo, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Wilhelmina NdapewaOnyothi Nekoto, Pelonomi Moiloa, Jade Abbott, Vukosi Marivate, and Benjamin Rosman. 2025. The Esethu Framework: Reimagining Sustainable Dataset Governance and Curation for Low-Resource Languages. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 30763–30776, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- The Esethu Framework: Reimagining Sustainable Dataset Governance and Curation for Low-Resource Languages (Rajab et al., ACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1487.pdf