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Kunnafonidilaw ka Cadeau: an ASR dataset of present-day Bambara

Published: December 22, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2512.19400v1

By: Yacouba Diarra , Panga Azazia Kamate , Nouhoum Souleymane Coulibaly and more

Potential Business Impact:

Helps computers understand spoken Bambara language better.

Business Areas:
Speech Recognition Data and Analytics, Software

We present Kunkado, a 160-hour Bambara ASR dataset compiled from Malian radio archives to capture present-day spontaneous speech across a wide range of topics. It includes code-switching, disfluencies, background noise, and overlapping speakers that practical ASR systems encounter in real-world use. We finetuned Parakeet-based models on a 33.47-hour human-reviewed subset and apply pragmatic transcript normalization to reduce variability in number formatting, tags, and code-switching annotations. Evaluated on two real-world test sets, finetuning with Kunkado reduces WER from 44.47\% to 37.12\% on one and from 36.07\% to 32.33\% on the other. In human evaluation, the resulting model also outperforms a comparable system with the same architecture trained on 98 hours of cleaner, less realistic speech. We release the data and models to support robust ASR for predominantly oral languages.

Page Count
7 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Computation and Language