Towards End-to-End Training of Automatic Speech Recognition for Nigerian Pidgin

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11123v1
• Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2020 16:32:58 GMT
• Title: Towards End-to-End Training of Automatic Speech Recognition for Nigerian Pidgin
• Authors: Daniel Ajisafe, Oluwabukola Adegboro, Esther Oduntan, Tayo Arulogun
• Abstract summary: Nigerian pidgin is one of the most popular languages in West Africa. We present the first parallel (speech-to-text) data on Nigerian pidgin. We also trained the first end-to-end speech recognition system on this language.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Nigerian Pidgin remains one of the most popular languages in West Africa. With at least 75 million speakers along the West African coast, the language has spread to diasporic communities through Nigerian immigrants in England, Canada, and America, amongst others. In contrast, the language remains an under-resourced one in the field of natural language processing, particularly on speech recognition and translation tasks. In this work, we present the first parallel (speech-to-text) data on Nigerian pidgin. We also trained the first end-to-end speech recognition system (QuartzNet and Jasper model) on this language which were both optimized using Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss. With baseline results, we were able to achieve a low word error rate (WER) of 0.77% using a greedy decoder on our dataset. Finally, we open-source the data and code along with this publication in order to encourage future research in this direction.

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