Professor/dagaare-speech-data

Dagaare Speech Data (Pooled)

A ~104.3-hour Dagaare (Dagara) speech corpus, drawn from a single source (WAXAL) and filtered to only genuinely transcribed audio. Part of the AfroNet multi-language TTS data effort.

Source

WAXAL (google/WaxalNLP), dga_asr config — crowdsourced, image-prompted speech (a shared collection pipeline also used for Dagbani, Ikposo, and Akan's aka_asr in this collection). 18,859 clips, 104.3h, source = waxal.

A known upstream bug, verified not to affect this release: WAXAL's dga_asr and dag_asr (Dagbani) configs have swapped audio filenames — every clip in dga_asr carries a filename prefixed with Dagbani's naming convention (dag_gh_image_...) and vice versa. This does not affect the actual audio/transcript pairing used here (each config's own rows are pulled together correctly regardless of filename content), and independent linguistic analysis of the transcript text confirmed the language labels themselves are correct: this config's text consistently uses Dagaare's documented postverbal factive particle la (e.g. "Palamɛ die la a kyɛ"), distinct from Dagbani's post-nominal determiner pattern (ŋɔ/maa) found in the dag_asr config. The bug is cosmetic (filenames only), not a language mislabel.

train+validation+test splits are pooled together (intentional, same policy already applied to WAXAL's _tts configs used elsewhere in AfroNet); the unlabeled split (untranscribed audio) is excluded, consistent with AfroNet's no-auto-transcription policy.

All audio is standardized to 16 kHz mono FLAC (lossless), 1–30 second clips.

Format

The dataset ships as WebDataset-style tar shards (shards/shard-00000.tar …, ~1 GB each, one {key}.flac file per clip) plus a single manifest (manifest.parquet / manifest.jsonl):

Column	Description
key, shard	which tar file + entry holds this clip's audio
text	transcript (native script)
duration	seconds
source	always waxal
dataset_id	always 0
split	train / val (250 clips held out for evaluation)
speaker_id	source-provided speaker ID
gender	speaker metadata where available
domain	always dga_asr
dbfs, clip_ratio, sil_ratio	cheap DSP quality proxies: loudness, fraction of clipped samples, fraction of near-silent frames
has_disfluency	always false

Usage

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
import pandas as pd, tarfile, io, soundfile as sf

mp = hf_hub_download("Professor/dagaare-speech-data", "manifest.parquet", repo_type="dataset")
df = pd.read_parquet(mp)

row = df.iloc[0]
shard_path = hf_hub_download("Professor/dagaare-speech-data", f"shards/{row.shard}", repo_type="dataset")
with tarfile.open(shard_path) as tar:
    audio_bytes = tar.extractfile(f"{row.key}.flac").read()
arr, sr = sf.read(io.BytesIO(audio_bytes))

The tar shards are also directly readable by the webdataset library for streaming training pipelines.

Intended use & limitations

Built for Dagaare TTS/ASR research, in particular as finetuning data for a multilingual TTS model that doesn't natively support Dagaare. Speech is crowdsourced and image-prompted, with many speakers and variable recording conditions rather than studio-controlled. This is a research aggregation; usage should respect WAXAL's own terms.

License

CC BY 4.0, per the upstream WAXAL release.

Acknowledgments

Deep thanks to the WAXAL project (Google) and its Dagaare-speaking contributors for the source corpus.

This dataset was pooled by Victor Olufemi and LyngualLabs as part of the AfroNet multi-language TTS data effort.