Southern Kurdish Speech Recognition Resources and Benchmarking

Abstract

This article introduces a dedicated speech recognition dataset for Southern Kurdish, which is a threatened variant of Kurdish macrolanguage. We present 30 hours of validated read speech for training and an evaluation benchmark for Southern Kurdish Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Both the training data and evaluation benchmark are read speech recorded by crowdsourcing campaigns. Besides a detailed description of the provided resources, we provide the ASR baselines using Whisper-turbo and wav2vec-bert CTC architectures. We achieved a 4.09 CER and 24.26 WER on our benchmark using wav2vec-bert model. We also provide a categorization of errors to support further improvements in future studies.The resources and trained models are released under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license and are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/aranemini/southern-kurdish-asr

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