boffire/tatoeba-kabyle-audio

Tatoeba Kabyle Audio Dataset

A clean, standardized audio-text dataset for Kabyle (Taqbaylit) automatic speech recognition, extracted from the Tatoeba Project and rigorously orthographically corrected.

Dataset Description

This dataset contains 47,789 Kabyle sentences with audio recordings (~25.78 hours total) sourced from Tatoeba. All transcriptions have been standardized to use correct Kabyle Latin characters, replacing visually similar false friends from Greek, Cyrillic, and other Latin scripts that commonly contaminate Kabyle text corpora.

Character Standardization

Kabyle uses the following Latin characters in its standard orthography:

• —ɛ (U+025B) / Ɛ (U+0190) — open-mid front unrounded vowel
• —ɣ (U+0263) / Ɣ (U+0194) — voiced velar fricative
• —č (U+010D) / Č (U+010C) — voiceless postalveolar affricate
• —ǧ (U+01E7) / Ǧ (U+01E6) — voiced postalveolar affricate
• —ḥ (U+1E25), ḍ (U+1E0D), ṛ (U+1E5B), ṭ (U+1E6D), ṣ (U+1E63), ẓ (U+1E93) — emphatic/pharyngeal consonants

These are frequently confused with visually similar characters in raw web data. This dataset applies the following corrections:

Additionally, Unicode NFC normalization is applied to resolve precomposed vs. decomposed forms (e.g., z + combining dot below → ẓ).

3,643 sentences (7.62%) required at least one character fix.

Audio Statistics

The audio consists of short, read-aloud sentences typical of the Tatoeba project. The tight duration distribution (most clips are 1–3 seconds) makes this dataset well-suited for Wav2Vec 2.0 CTC training with minimal memory overhead.

File Sizes

Splits

Features

• —sentence_id: Tatoeba sentence ID
• —text_raw: Original transcription from Tatoeba (before cleaning)
• —text: Cleaned, standardized Kabyle transcription
• —audio: Audio waveform (16 kHz, mono)
• —character_fixed: Boolean flag indicating whether a false-friend fix was applied

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("boffire/tatoeba-kabyle-audio")
sample = ds["train"][0]
print(sample["text"])
# → standardized Kabyle sentence

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the Tatoeba Project:

@misc{tatoeba,
  title = {Tatoeba: Collection of sentences and translations},
  howpublished = {\url{https://tatoeba.org}},
}

License

Audio files and sentences from Tatoeba are licensed under CC BY 4.0 (or compatible individual licenses as noted in the original Tatoeba metadata).

Acknowledgments

• —Tatoeba Project contributors
• —Dataset prepared by boffire