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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ogunremi-etal-2024-iroyinspeech,
title = "{{\`I}}r{\`o}y{\`i}n{S}peech: A Multi-purpose {Y}or{\`u}b{\'a} Speech Corpus",
author = "Ogunremi, Tolulope and
Tubosun, Kola and
Aremu, Anuoluwapo and
Orife, Iroro and
Adelani, David Ifeoluwa",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Kan, Min-Yen and
Hoste, Veronique and
Lenci, Alessandro and
Sakti, Sakriani and
Xue, Nianwen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = may,
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.812/",
pages = "9296--9303"
}