Collecting and evaluating speech recognition corpora for nine Southern Bantu languages

Abstract

We describe the Lwazi corpus for automatic speech recognition (ASR), a new telephone speech corpus which includes data from nine Southern Bantu languages. Because of practical constraints, the amount of speech per language is relatively small compared to major corpora in world languages, and we report on our investigation of the stability of the ASR models derived from the corpus. We also report on phoneme distance measures across languages, and describe initial phone recognisers that were developed using this data.