ÌròyìnSpeech: A Multi-purpose Yorùbá Speech Corpus
Tolulope Ogunremi, Kola Tubosun, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Iroro Orife, David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Abstract
We introduce ÌròyìnSpeech corpus—a new dataset influenced by a desire to increase the amount of high quality, freely available, contemporary Yorùbá speech data that can be used for both Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks. We curated about 23,000 text sentences from the news and creative writing domains with an open license i.e., CC-BY-4.0 and asked multiple speakers to record each sentence. To encourage more participatory approach to data creation, we provide 5 000 utterances from the curated sentences to the Mozilla Common Voice platform to crowd-source the recording and validation of Yorùbá speech data. In total, we created about 42 hours of speech data recorded by 80 volunteers in-house, and 6 hours validated recordings on Mozilla Common Voice platform. Our evaluation on TTS shows that we can create a good quality general domain single-speaker TTS model for Yorùbá with as little 5 hours of speech by leveraging an end-to-end VITS architecture. Similarly, for ASR, we obtained a WER of 21.5.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.812
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 9296–9303
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.812
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Tolulope Ogunremi, Kola Tubosun, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Iroro Orife, and David Ifeoluwa Adelani. 2024. ÌròyìnSpeech: A Multi-purpose Yorùbá Speech Corpus. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 9296–9303, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- ÌròyìnSpeech: A Multi-purpose Yorùbá Speech Corpus (Ogunremi et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.812.pdf