A Crowdsourced Open-Source Kazakh Speech Corpus and Initial Speech Recognition Baseline

Yerbolat Khassanov, Saida Mussakhojayeva, Almas Mirzakhmetov, Alen Adiyev, Mukhamet Nurpeiissov, Huseyin Atakan Varol


Abstract
We present an open-source speech corpus for the Kazakh language. The Kazakh speech corpus (KSC) contains around 332 hours of transcribed audio comprising over 153,000 utterances spoken by participants from different regions and age groups, as well as both genders. It was carefully inspected by native Kazakh speakers to ensure high quality. The KSC is the largest publicly available database developed to advance various Kazakh speech and language processing applications. In this paper, we first describe the data collection and preprocessing procedures followed by a description of the database specifications. We also share our experience and challenges faced during the database construction, which might benefit other researchers planning to build a speech corpus for a low-resource language. To demonstrate the reliability of the database, we performed preliminary speech recognition experiments. The experimental results imply that the quality of audio and transcripts is promising (2.8% character error rate and 8.7% word error rate on the test set). To enable experiment reproducibility and ease the corpus usage, we also released an ESPnet recipe for our speech recognition models.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.58
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
697–706
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.58
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.58
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yerbolat Khassanov, Saida Mussakhojayeva, Almas Mirzakhmetov, Alen Adiyev, Mukhamet Nurpeiissov, and Huseyin Atakan Varol. 2021. A Crowdsourced Open-Source Kazakh Speech Corpus and Initial Speech Recognition Baseline. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 697–706, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Crowdsourced Open-Source Kazakh Speech Corpus and Initial Speech Recognition Baseline (Khassanov et al., EACL 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2021.eacl-main.58.pdf
Code
 IS2AI/ISSAI_SAIDA_Kazakh_ASR