Papers by Chibuzor Okocha
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. |
AfriVox: Probing Multilingual and Accent Robustness of Speech LLMs (2026.eacl-long)
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Busayo Awobade, Mardhiyah Sanni, Tassallah Abdullahi, Chibuzor Okocha, Kelechi Ezema, Devendra Deepak Kayande, Lukman Enegi Ismaila, Tobi Olatunji, Gloria Ashiya Katuka
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal and speech-native large language models have delivered impressive speech recognition, translation, understanding, and question-answering capabilities for high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark African languages and African-accented French, Arabic, and 100+ African English accents across 20 African languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms traditional speech transcription and translation models in African languages and non-native French or English accents. |
Afrispeech Semantics: Evaluating Audio–Semantic Reasoning in Spoken Language Models Across Domains and Accents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent multimodal models are trained on large collections of audio-text pairs using contrastive learning or nexttoken prediction objectives. |
| Approach: | They evaluate audio language models across five semantic and paralinguistic reasoning tasks: entailment, consistency, plausibility, accent drift, and accent restraint. |
| Outcome: | The evaluations assess models across five tasks including entailment, consistency, plausibility, accent drift, and accent restraint. |