AccentFold: A Journey through African Accents for Zero-Shot ASR Adaptation to Target Accents (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | AccentFold uses spatial relationships to improve speech recognition for accented speech . existing methods for accent recognition have been limited due to data scarcity and budget constraints . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that exploits spatial relationships between learned accent embeddings to improve downstream automatic speech recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods in accented speech training. |
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| Challenge: | Accents play a pivotal role in shaping human communication, a new study finds . existing ASR systems often perform inadequately, even mispronouncing African names . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses epistemic uncertainty to automate annotation to reduce costs and human labor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces costs and human labor by reducing data annotation and epistemic uncertainty. |
Accented Speech Recognition With Accent-specific Codebooks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Degradation in performance across underrepresented accents is a severe deterrent to inclusive adoption of ASR. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to adapt speech accents to unseen accents by using cross-attention with a trainable set of codebooks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields significant performance gains on the seen English accents and unseen accents on the Mozilla Common Voice dataset. |
An (unhelpful) guide to selecting the best ASR architecture for your under-resourced language (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | English ASR now has word error rates comparable to that of human transcriptionists, but only for the handful of the world's 7000 languages with abundant training resources. |
| Approach: | They propose to use four of the most popular ASR toolkits to train ASR models for eleven languages with limited ASR training resources: eleven widely spoken languages of Africa, Asia, and South America, one endangered language of Central America, and three critically endangered languages of North America. |
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Evaluation of Off-the-shelf Speech Recognizers on Different Accents in a Dialogue Domain (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing automatic speech recognition systems for non-American accents have a much higher error rate than for general american accents. |
| Approach: | They evaluate automatic speech recognition systems on agent-directed speech . they find that the performance is worse for non-American accents than for General American . |
| Outcome: | The ASR systems perform worse for non-American accents than for General American accents . the results suggest that training on non-native English speakers is needed to narrow the performance gap. |
Afrispeech-Dialog: A Benchmark Dataset for Spontaneous English Conversations in Healthcare and Beyond (2025.naacl-long)
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Mardhiyah Sanni, Tassallah Abdullahi, Devendra Deepak Kayande, Emmanuel Ayodele, Naome A Etori, Michael Samwel Mollel, Moshood O. Yekini, Chibuzor Okocha, Lukman Enegi Ismaila, Folafunmi Omofoye, Boluwatife A. Adewale, Tobi Olatunji
| Challenge: | Afrispeech-Dialog is a benchmark dataset of 50 simulated medical and non-medical African-accented English conversations . a 10%+ performance degradation is found in ASR systems on long-form, accented speech . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to evaluate automatic speech recognition systems on African-accented conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset compares state-of-the-art speech recognition systems on accented conversations with native accents and shows a 10%+ performance degradation. |
How Accents Confound: Probing for Accent Information in End-to-End Speech Recognition Systems (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new study examines how accent information is encoded and propagated in an end-to-end ASR system. |
| Approach: | They propose to use phone probes to analyze phonetic content of representations at each layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a large amount of US-accented English speech and is compared with other models using phone probes. |
AccentDB: A Database of Non-Native English Accents to Assist Neural Speech Recognition (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | aaron e. sanchez and joe saunders: automatic speech recognition still faces a major challenge . they say accents are a way of pronouncing a language, and speakers always have manner of speaking . esassen: accents can be used to identify non-native speakers of a speech . |
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| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared against human-labelled accent classes and is generalized against human data. |
MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages (2021.tacl-1)
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David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jade Abbott, Graham Neubig, Daniel D’souza, Julia Kreutzer, Constantine Lignos, Chester Palen-Michel, Happy Buzaaba, Shruti Rijhwani, Sebastian Ruder, Stephen Mayhew, Israel Abebe Azime, Shamsuddeen H. Muhammad, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Perez Ogayo, Aremu Anuoluwapo, Catherine Gitau, Derguene Mbaye, Jesujoba Alabi, Seid Muhie Yimam, Tajuddeen Rabiu Gwadabe, Ignatius Ezeani, Rubungo Andre Niyongabo, Jonathan Mukiibi, Verrah Otiende, Iroro Orife, Davis David, Samba Ngom, Tosin Adewumi, Paul Rayson, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Gerald Muriuki, Emmanuel Anebi, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Nkiruka Odu, Eric Peter Wairagala, Samuel Oyerinde, Clemencia Siro, Tobius Saul Bateesa, Temilola Oloyede, Yvonne Wambui, Victor Akinode, Deborah Nabagereka, Maurice Katusiime, Ayodele Awokoya, Mouhamadane MBOUP, Dibora Gebreyohannes, Henok Tilaye, Kelechi Nwaike, Degaga Wolde, Abdoulaye Faye, Blessing Sibanda, Orevaoghene Ahia, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Kelechi Ogueji, Thierno Ibrahima DIOP, Abdoulaye Diallo, Adewale Akinfaderin, Tendai Marengereke, Salomey Osei
| Challenge: | (2020) African languages are underrepresented in existing natural language processing datasets, research, and tools due to lack of datasets and reproducible results. |
| Approach: | They propose to create a dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages. |
| Outcome: | The results of the first large dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages are released to inform future research on African NLP. |
MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)
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David Adelani, Graham Neubig, Sebastian Ruder, Shruti Rijhwani, Michael Beukman, Chester Palen-Michel, Constantine Lignos, Jesujoba Alabi, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Peter Nabende, Cheikh M. Bamba Dione, Andiswa Bukula, Rooweither Mabuya, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Blessing Sibanda, Happy Buzaaba, Jonathan Mukiibi, Godson Kalipe, Derguene Mbaye, Amelia Taylor, Fatoumata Kabore, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Perez Ogayo, Catherine Gitau, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Victoire Memdjokam Koagne, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Tebogo Macucwa, Vukosi Marivate, Mboning Tchiaze Elvis, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Tosin Adewumi, Orevaoghene Ahia, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Neo Lerato Mokono, Ignatius Ezeani, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Mofetoluwa Oluwaseun Adeyemi, Gilles Quentin Hacheme, Idris Abdulmumin, Odunayo Ogundepo, Oreen Yousuf, Tatiana Moteu, Dietrich Klakow
| Challenge: | Existing studies on named entity recognition methods for African languages focus on English as the source language, but there is evidence that it is not the best for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human-annotated datasets to analyze named entity recognition tasks in 20 African languages to test whether they are effective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves zero-shot F1 scores by 14% over 20 languages compared to using English . |
SAFARI: A Community-Engaged Approach and Dataset of Stereotype Resources in the Sub-Saharan African Context (2026.eacl-short)
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Aishwarya Verma, Laud Ammah, Olivia Nercy Ndlovu Lucas, Andrew Zaldivar, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Sunipa Dev
| Challenge: | Existing data collection approaches to generative AI are inadequate to assess its safety and utility. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual stereotype resource that uses socioculturally-situated, community-engaged methods to assess the region’s linguistic diversity and traditional orality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method covers four sub-Saharan African countries that are severely underrepresented in NLP resources: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. |