WolBanking77: Wolof Banking Speech Intent Classification Dataset
This addresses a gap for low-resource languages like Wolof, where high illiteracy rates limit text-based models, though it is incremental as it primarily provides a new dataset.
The authors tackled the lack of intent classification resources for low-resource languages by introducing WolBanking77, a Wolof banking speech dataset with 9,791 text sentences and over 4 hours of audio, reporting promising baseline F1-scores and word error rates.
Intent classification models have made a significant progress in recent years. However, previous studies primarily focus on high-resource language datasets, which results in a gap for low-resource languages and for regions with high rates of illiteracy, where languages are more spoken than read or written. This is the case in Senegal, for example, where Wolof is spoken by around 90\% of the population, while the national illiteracy rate remains at of 42\%. Wolof is actually spoken by more than 10 million people in West African region. To address these limitations, we introduce the Wolof Banking Speech Intent Classification Dataset (WolBanking77), for academic research in intent classification. WolBanking77 currently contains 9,791 text sentences in the banking domain and more than 4 hours of spoken sentences. Experiments on various baselines are conducted in this work, including text and voice state-of-the-art models. The results are very promising on this current dataset. In addition, this paper presents an in-depth examination of the dataset's contents. We report baseline F1-scores and word error rates metrics respectively on NLP and ASR models trained on WolBanking77 dataset and also comparisons between models. Dataset and code available at: https://github.com/abdoukarim/wolbanking77.