turiabu/Sagalee

Sagalee – Automatic Speech Recognition Dataset for Afaan Oromoo

Dataset Description

Sagalee is Speech Recognition Dataset for Oromo language Presented in the paper: <br> Sagalee: an Open Source Automatic Speech Recognition Dataset for Oromo Language at ICASSP 2025

• —Training Code: turinaaf/Sagalee
• —Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00421

The dataset is released under Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) It contains read-speech recordings from native Oromo speakers (283 speakers) representing multiple dialectal regions. Each audio file is paired with its corresponding orthographic transcription. Total duration of the dataset is 100 hours.

Dataset Structure

Splits

Total duration: 100hrs | Split | Description | |-------|-------------| | train | Training set 93.6hrs | | dev | Development / val set 4.2hrs | | test | Test set 2.4hrs|

Data Fields

Each speaker folder (named after speaker_id) contains utterences (.wav) and transcripts (.txt) files with same name.

Dialect Regions

The following Oromo dialectal varieties are represented. Majority of utterences are from Wallagaa-Maccaa Giddugala/Shawaa-Tuulama and Arsii-Baalee

• —Wallagga-Maccaa (48.8%)
• —Giddugala / Shawaa-Tuulama (21.9%)
• —Arsii-Baale (20.5%)
• —Jimmaa-Iluu (4.2%)
• —Harargee
• —Boorana-Gabra
• —Gujii
• —Walloo-Raayya

The remaining 4 regions are 4.6% of the dataset.

Speaker Demographics

Baseline results

The dataset is used to train conformer model from scratch and finetuned the Whisper-large-v3. The following table shows baseline result evaluated on test set of Sagalee without using Language Model using Word Error Rate as metric. | Model | Training Mode | WER (%) | |---------------------|----------------|---------| | Conformer (AED) | From scratch | 15.32 | | Conformer (CTC) | From scratch | 18.74 | | Whisper Large-v3 | Fine-tuning | 10.82 |

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

sagalee_ds = load_dataset("turiabu/Sagalee")
print(sagalee_ds)

Output:

DatasetDict({
    test: Dataset({
        features: ['audio', 'transcription', 'speaker_id', 'gender', 'age_group', 'dialect', 'split', 'utterance_id'],
        num_rows: 1178
    })
    dev: Dataset({
        features: ['audio', 'transcription', 'speaker_id', 'gender', 'age_group', 'dialect', 'split', 'utterance_id'],
        num_rows: 2387
    })
    train: Dataset({
        features: ['audio', 'transcription', 'speaker_id', 'gender', 'age_group', 'dialect', 'split', 'utterance_id'],
        num_rows: 50008
    })
})

Supported Tasks

• —Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
• —Text-to-Speech
• —Dialect / Speaker Identification

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@INPROCEEDINGS{10890761,
  author={Abu, Turi and Shi, Ying and Zheng, Thomas Fang and Wang, Dong},
  booktitle={ICASSP 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
  title={Sagalee: an Open Source Automatic Speech Recognition Dataset for Oromo Language},
  year={2025},
  pages={1-5},
  doi={10.1109/ICASSP49660.2025.10890761}
}

License

This dataset is released under the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Contact

For questions or issues, please open a discussion on the dataset repository.