Paper Reading AI Learner

Tone-Conditioned Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Bantu Speech Recognition

2026-06-30 13:23:25
Kesego Mokgosi, Vukosi Marivate, Sitwala Mundia, Unarine Netshifhefhe, Tsholofelo Hope Mogale, Thapelo Sindane
arXiv_CL
             
Abstract

Southern Bantu languages are spoken by over 80 million people, yet current foundation ASR models still produce zero-shot WER above 100%, which limits practical use in education and public services. We addressed this gap with a tone conditioned curriculum framework for 6 Southern Bantu languages that combined hybrid difficulty scoring, gated adapters driven by tonal statistics and staged curriculum training. We trained on a community corpus and tested transfer to NCHLT to measure robustness beyond matched evaluation. Results revealed clear interactions between architecture and language, with W2V-BERT outperforming Whisper on Nguni languages by 3 to 4 WER points whilst Whisper performed better on Sotho-Tswana languages. W2V-BERT with tone conditioning reached 28.41% average WER across datasets and 23.79% on Xitsonga transfer. No single model suited all 6 languages, so deployment should pair model selection per language with validation across corpora.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31642

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.31642.pdf

Tags
3D Action Action_Localization Action_Recognition Activity Adversarial Agent Attention Autonomous Bert Boundary_Detection Caption Chat Classification CNN Compressive_Sensing Contour Contrastive_Learning Deep_Learning Denoising Detection Dialog Diffusion Drone Dynamic_Memory_Network Edge_Detection Embedding Embodied Emotion Enhancement Face Face_Detection Face_Recognition Facial_Landmark Few-Shot Gait_Recognition GAN Gaze_Estimation Gesture Gradient_Descent Handwriting Human_Parsing Image_Caption Image_Classification Image_Compression Image_Enhancement Image_Generation Image_Matting Image_Retrieval Inference Inpainting Intelligent_Chip Knowledge Knowledge_Graph Language_Model LLM Matching Medical Memory_Networks Multi_Modal Multi_Task NAS NMT Object_Detection Object_Tracking OCR Ontology Optical_Character Optical_Flow Optimization Person_Re-identification Point_Cloud Portrait_Generation Pose Pose_Estimation Prediction QA Quantitative Quantitative_Finance Quantization Re-identification Recognition Recommendation Reconstruction Regularization Reinforcement_Learning Relation Relation_Extraction Represenation Represenation_Learning Restoration Review RNN Robot Salient Scene_Classification Scene_Generation Scene_Parsing Scene_Text Segmentation Self-Supervised Semantic_Instance_Segmentation Semantic_Segmentation Semi_Global Semi_Supervised Sence_graph Sentiment Sentiment_Classification Sketch SLAM Sparse Speech Speech_Recognition Style_Transfer Summarization Super_Resolution Surveillance Survey Text_Classification Text_Generation Time_Series Tracking Transfer_Learning Transformer Unsupervised Video_Caption Video_Classification Video_Indexing Video_Prediction Video_Retrieval Visual_Relation VQA Weakly_Supervised Zero-Shot