Model Card for swahili_mfa

This MFA model is for aligning Swahili speech.

• Model details
• Uses
• Performance Factors
• Dictionary Details
• Training Details
• Evaluation
• Contact

Model Details

Model Description

• Developed by: Michael McAuliffe
• Funded by: N/A
• Model type: Montreal Forced Aligner model
• Language(s) (NLP): Swahili
• License: cc-by-4.0

Uses

Direct Use

This model is intended to be used for forced alignment of Swahili speech. Please see https://montreal-forced-aligner.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide/troubleshooting.html for details on common fixes.

Out-of-Scope Use

This model cannot provide accurate assessments of goodness of pronunciations or provide transcripts as it is trained to be accepting of variation in pronunciation to provide a reasonable alignment for Swahili speech.

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

This model will perform best on the variety of speech that it was trained on. The speakers in the training data are all adult speakers, so child speech alignment may not be accurate.

Recommendations

When using this model on a variety that it was not trained on, better results can be attained by adapting the model to the data to be aligned first. See https://montreal-forced-aligner.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide/workflows/adapt_acoustic_model.html and https://github.com/mmcauliffe/mfa-adaptation for example usage and scripts.

How to Get Started with the Model

Use the code below to get started with the model.

To get started, follow the instructions for installing MFA. To align files using this model, use the mfa align command.

Dictionary Details

Details for swahili_mfa dictionary and G2P model

• Source: wikipron
• Orthography: Latin
• Phone set: MFA
• Words: 64,965

• Phones: 38
• Graphemes: 74

IPA chart

Consonants

Manner	Labial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Alveopalatal	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m	ɱ		n		ɲ	ŋ
Stop	p b			t d			k ɡ
Implosive	ɓ			ɗ			ɠ
Affricate					tʃ dʒ
Sibilant				s z	ʃ
Fricative		f v	θ ð					h
Approximant	w					j
Tap				ɾ
Lateral				l

Vowels

	Front	Near-Front	Central	Near-Back	Back
Close	i iː				u uː
Close-Mid
Open-Mid	ɛ ɛː				ɔ ɔː
Open					ɑ ɑː

Training Details

Training Data

Common Voice Swahili

• Source: https://voice.mozilla.org/en/datasets
• License: CC-0
• Dialects: N/A
• Number of hours: 702.69
• Number of utterances: 473,364
• Number of speakers: 570
  • Female speakers: 148
  • Male speakers: 125
  • Unknown speakers: 297

ALFFA Swahili

• Source: https://openslr.org/25/
• License: MIT
• Dialects: N/A
• Number of hours: 11.75
• Number of utterances: 12,171
• Number of speakers: 36
  • Female speakers: 0
  • Male speakers: 0
  • Unknown speakers: 36

GlobalPhone Swahili

• Source: https://catalogue.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0375/
• License: ELRA
• Dialects: N/A
• Number of hours: 11.12
• Number of utterances: 7,728
• Number of speakers: 70
  • Female speakers: 35
  • Male speakers: 31
  • Unknown speakers: 4

A Kiswahili dataset

• Source: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/rbn6nmygcn/1
• License: CC BY 4.0
• Dialects: N/A
• Number of hours: 10.70
• Number of utterances: 6,169
• Number of speakers: 1
  • Female speakers: 0
  • Male speakers: 1
  • Unknown speakers: 0

Training Procedure

Preprocessing

Preprocessing include fixes and orthographic standardization to various corpora.

Training Hyperparameters

• Training regime: Training configuration

Evaluation

Testing Data, Factors & Metrics

Testing Data

N/A

Factors

N/A

Metrics

N/A

Results

N/A

Summary

Technical Specifications

Model Architecture and Objective

HMM-GMM model

Software

This model was trained via the Montreal Forced Aligner.

Citation

BibTeX:

@techreport{mfa_swahili_mfa_acoustic_2026,
    author={McAuliffe, Michael and Sonderegger, Morgan},
    title={Swahili MFA acoustic model v3.3.0},
    address={\url{https://huggingface.co/MontrealCorpusTools/swahili_mfa}},
    year={2026},
    month={Jun},
}

APA:

McAuliffe, M. & Sonderegger, M. (2026). Swahili MFA acoustic model v3.3.0. Available at https://huggingface.co/MontrealCorpusTools/swahili_mfa.

Contact

For questions and issues, please file an issue either for this model at https://huggingface.co/MontrealCorpusTools/swahili_mfa/discussions or for larger MFA issues at https://github.com/MontrealCorpusTools/Montreal-Forced-Aligner/issues.