Kola Tubosun


2024

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ÌròyìnSpeech: A Multi-purpose Yorùbá Speech Corpus
Tolulope Ogunremi | Kola Tubosun | Anuoluwapo Aremu | Iroro Orife | David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

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.