Kunnafonidilaw ka Cadeau: an ASR dataset of present-day Bambara
Abstract
Kunkado, a Bambara ASR dataset, improves finetuned Parakeet models' performance on real-world speech with code-switching and background noise.
We present Kunkado, a 160-hour Bambara ASR dataset compiled from Malian radio archives to capture present-day spontaneous speech across a wide range of topics. It includes code-switching, disfluencies, background noise, and overlapping speakers that practical ASR systems encounter in real-world use. We finetuned Parakeet-based models on a 33.47-hour human-reviewed subset and apply pragmatic transcript normalization to reduce variability in number formatting, tags, and code-switching annotations. Evaluated on two real-world test sets, finetuning with Kunkado reduces WER from 44.47\% to 37.12\% on one and from 36.07\% to 32.33\% on the other. In human evaluation, the resulting model also outperforms a comparable system with the same architecture trained on 98 hours of cleaner, less realistic speech. We release the data and models to support robust ASR for predominantly oral languages.
Models citing this paper 0
No model linking this paper
Datasets citing this paper 1
Spaces citing this paper 0
No Space linking this paper
Collections including this paper 0
No Collection including this paper