Kola Tubosun

Tolulope Ogunremi, Kola Tubosun, Anuoluwapo Aremu et al.

We introduce ÌròyìnSpeech, a new corpus influenced by the desire to increase the amount of high quality, contemporary Yorùbá speech data, which can be used for both Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks. We curated about 23000 text sentences from news and creative writing domains with the open license CC-BY-4.0. To encourage a participatory approach to data creation, we provide 5000 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 of validated recordings on Mozilla Common Voice platform. Our TTS evaluation suggests that a high-fidelity, general domain, single-speaker Yorùbá voice is possible with as little as 5 hours of speech. Similarly, for ASR we obtained a baseline word error rate (WER) of 23.8.

Iroro Orife, David I. Adelani, Timi Fasubaa et al.

Yorùbá is a widely spoken West African language with a writing system rich in orthographic and tonal diacritics. They provide morphological information, are crucial for lexical disambiguation, pronunciation and are vital for any computational Speech or Natural Language Processing tasks. However diacritic marks are commonly excluded from electronic texts due to limited device and application support as well as general education on proper usage. We report on recent efforts at dataset cultivation. By aggregating and improving disparate texts from the web and various personal libraries, we were able to significantly grow our clean Yorùbá dataset from a majority Bibilical text corpora with three sources to millions of tokens from over a dozen sources. We evaluate updated diacritic restoration models on a new, general purpose, public-domain Yorùbá evaluation dataset of modern journalistic news text, selected to be multi-purpose and reflecting contemporary usage. All pre-trained models, datasets and source-code have been released as an open-source project to advance efforts on Yorùbá language technology.