ShobdoSetu: A Data-Centric Framework for Bengali Long-Form Speech Recognition and Speaker Diarization
This work addresses the under-served needs of over 230 million Bengali speakers by providing incremental improvements in speech processing with limited annotated data.
The paper tackled Bengali long-form speech recognition and speaker diarization by developing a data-centric framework using YouTube audiobooks and dramas, achieving a Word Error Rate of 15.551 on a private test set and a Diarization Error Rate of 0.26723.
Bengali is spoken by over 230 million people yet remains severely under-served in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization research. In this paper, we present our system for the DL Sprint 4.0 Bengali Long-Form Speech Recognition (Task~1) and Bengali Speaker Diarization Challenge (Task~2). For Task~1, we propose a data-centric pipeline that constructs a high-quality training corpus from Bengali YouTube audiobooks and dramas \cite{tabib2026bengaliloop}, incorporating LLM-assisted language normalization, fuzzy-matching-based chunk boundary validation, and muffled-zone augmentation. Fine-tuning the \texttt{tugstugi/whisper-medium} model on approximately 21,000 data points with beam size 5, we achieve a Word Error Rate (WER) of 16.751 on the public leaderboard and 15.551 on the private test set. For Task~2, we fine-tune the pyannote.audio community-1 segmentation model with targeted hyperparameter optimization under an extreme low-resource setting (10 training files), achieving a Diarization Error Rate (DER) of 0.19974 on the public leaderboard, and .26723 on the private test set. Our results demonstrate that careful data engineering and domain-adaptive fine-tuning can yield competitive performance for Bengali speech processing even without large annotated corpora.