Huqariq: A Multilingual Speech Corpus of Native Languages of Peru for Speech Recognition
This addresses the problem of preserving endangered languages in Peru for researchers and developers in speech technology, though it is incremental as it primarily provides a new dataset.
The authors tackled the lack of speech data for native Peruvian languages by creating the Huqariq corpus, a multilingual collection with 220 hours of transcribed audio from over 500 volunteers, making it the largest such corpus in Peru.
The Huqariq corpus is a multilingual collection of speech from native Peruvian languages. The transcribed corpus is intended for the research and development of speech technologies to preserve endangered languages in Peru. Huqariq is primarily designed for the development of automatic speech recognition, language identification and text-to-speech tools. In order to achieve corpus collection sustainably, we employ the crowdsourcing methodology. Huqariq includes four native languages of Peru, and it is expected that by the end of the year 2022, it can reach up to 20 native languages out of the 48 native languages in Peru. The corpus has 220 hours of transcribed audio recorded by more than 500 volunteers, making it the largest speech corpus for native languages in Peru. In order to verify the quality of the corpus, we present speech recognition experiments using 220 hours of fully transcribed audio.