Sometin Beta Pass Notin (SBPN): Improving Multilingual ASR for Nigerian Languages via Knowledge Distillation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17710v1
• Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 00:22:18 GMT
• Title: Sometin Beta Pass Notin (SBPN): Improving Multilingual ASR for Nigerian Languages via Knowledge Distillation
• Abstract summary: Nigerian languages present unique modelling hurdles, including acute data scarcity, inconsistent orthography, tonal diacritics, diverse accents, frequent code-switching, and localized named entities.<n>To address these challenges, we developed a multilingual ASR framework utilizing a two-stage distillation process.<n>We introduce Sometin Beta Pass Notin (SBPN), a foundational multilingual ASR model covering Yorb, Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin, and Nigerian English.
• Score: 1.9346797099839141
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Although modern multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems support several Nigerian languages, their performance consistently lags behind high-resource languages like English and French. Nigerian languages present unique modelling hurdles, including acute data scarcity, inconsistent orthography, tonal diacritics, diverse accents, frequent code-switching, and localized named entities. To address these challenges, we developed a multilingual ASR framework utilizing a two-stage distillation process. First, we employ student-teacher knowledge distillation from existing monolingual models, conditioned on robust language-specific N-gram language models. Second, we perform iterative self improvement using pseudo-labelled data to further refine accuracy. Our method significantly bridges the performance gap, achieving on average a relative Word Error Rate (WER) reduction of 29 % over monolingual baselines. Our models also outperform state-of-the-art multilingual models across major benchmarks, including Common Voice and Fleurs. We introduce Sometin Beta Pass Notin (SBPN), a foundational multilingual ASR model covering Yorùbá, Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin, and Nigerian English. SBPN is released in two sizes: SBPN-Base (120 M parameters) and SBPN-Large (600 M parameters). By releasing these as open foundation models, we aim to provide ASR resources for further research into the rich phonetic and cultural landscape of the region.

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