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WenetSpeech-Chuan: A Large-Scale Sichuanese Corpus with Rich Annotation for Dialectal Speech Processing

Published: September 22, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2509.18004v1

By: Yuhang Dai , Ziyu Zhang , Shuai Wang and more

Potential Business Impact:

Helps computers understand Chinese dialects better.

Business Areas:
Semantic Web Internet Services

The scarcity of large-scale, open-source data for dialects severely hinders progress in speech technology, a challenge particularly acute for the widely spoken Sichuanese dialects of Chinese. To address this critical gap, we introduce WenetSpeech-Chuan, a 10,000-hour, richly annotated corpus constructed using our novel Chuan-Pipeline, a complete data processing framework for dialectal speech. To facilitate rigorous evaluation and demonstrate the corpus's effectiveness, we also release high-quality ASR and TTS benchmarks, WenetSpeech-Chuan-Eval, with manually verified transcriptions. Experiments show that models trained on WenetSpeech-Chuan achieve state-of-the-art performance among open-source systems and demonstrate results comparable to commercial services. As the largest open-source corpus for Sichuanese dialects, WenetSpeech-Chuan not only lowers the barrier to research in dialectal speech processing but also plays a crucial role in promoting AI equity and mitigating bias in speech technologies. The corpus, benchmarks, models, and receipts are publicly available on our project page.


Page Count
5 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Computation and Language