A Large Dataset of Spontaneous Speech with the Accent Spoken in Sao Paulo for Automatic Speech Recognition Evaluation

Autor(es)

Lima, Rodrigo ; Leal, Sidney E. ; Candido Junior, Arnaldo ; Aluisio, Sandra M.

• Tipo de documento: Artigo Científico
• Fonte: INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, BRACIS 2024, PT I; v. 15412, p. 15-pg., 2025-01-01.

Resumo

We present a freely available spontaneous speech corpus for the Brazilian Portuguese language and report preliminary automatic speech recognition (ASR) results, using both the Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 and Distil-Whisper models fine-tuned and trained on our corpus. The NURC-SP Audio Corpus comprises 401 different speakers (204 females, 197 males) with a total of 239.30 h of transcribed audio recordings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large Paulistano accented spontaneous speech corpus dedicated to the ASR task in Portuguese. We first present the design and development procedures of the NURC-SP Audio Corpus, and then describe four ASR experiments in detail. The experiments demonstrated promising results for the applicability of the corpus for ASR. Specifically, we fine-tuned two versions of Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 model, trained a Distil-Whisper model using our dataset with labels determined by Whisper Large-V3 model, and fine-tuned this Distil-Whisper model with our corpus. Our best results were the Distil-Whisper fine-tuned over NURC-SP Audio Corpus with a WER of 24.22% followed by a fine-tuned versions ofWav2Vec2-XLSR-53 model with aWER of 33.73%, that is almost 10% point worse than Distil-Whisper's. To enable experiment reproducibility, we share the NURC-SP Audio Corpus dataset, pre-trained models, and training recipes in Hugging-Face and Github repositories. (AU)

• Processo FAPESP: 19/07665-4 - Centro de Inteligência Artificial
• Beneficiário: Fabio Gagliardi Cozman
• Modalidade de apoio: Auxílio à Pesquisa - Programa eScience e Data Science - Centros de Pesquisa em Engenharia