Dealing with the Hard Facts of Low-Resource African NLP

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18557v1
• Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:08:36 GMT
• Title: Dealing with the Hard Facts of Low-Resource African NLP
• Authors: Yacouba Diarra, Nouhoum Souleymane Coulibaly, Panga Azazia Kamaté, Madani Amadou Tall, Emmanuel Élisé Koné, Aymane Dembélé, Michael Leventhal,
• Abstract summary: This paper reports on the field collection of 612 hours of spontaneous speech in Bambara, a low-resource West African language.<n>We offer practical suggestions for data collection protocols, annotation, and model design, as well as evidence for the importance of performing human evaluation.
• Score: 0.6700983301090583
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Creating speech datasets, models, and evaluation frameworks for low-resource languages remains challenging given the lack of a broad base of pertinent experience to draw from. This paper reports on the field collection of 612 hours of spontaneous speech in Bambara, a low-resource West African language; the semi-automated annotation of that dataset with transcriptions; the creation of several monolingual ultra-compact and small models using the dataset; and the automatic and human evaluation of their output. We offer practical suggestions for data collection protocols, annotation, and model design, as well as evidence for the importance of performing human evaluation. In addition to the main dataset, multiple evaluation datasets, models, and code are made publicly available.

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