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🇪🇷 Tigre Speech Corpus (Broadcast Audio)
A large-scale, open-source speech dataset for the Tigre language (ISO 639-3: tig), developed to support Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech technology research, and language documentation for one of the least-resourced languages in the Afro-Asiatic family.
This corpus provides hundreds of hours of real-world spoken Tigre, sourced from long-form public radio programming, making it one of the most substantial publicly available speech resources for any low-resource East African language.
Dataset Summary
The dataset is derived from public radio broadcasts, covering a wide range of non-fiction spoken genres:
- News bulletins
- Long-form reports
- Radio interviews
- Documentaries
- Public-interest programming These recordings provide natural speech, varied speaking styles, and realistic acoustic conditions—ideal for training robust ASR systems.
Key Statistics
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Language | Tigre (tig) |
| Source | Public Radio Broadcasts (News, Interviews, Documentaries) |
| File Format | MP3 |
| Total Files | 2,227 |
| Total Duration | ~582 hours |
This scale makes the corpus valuable for both supervised ASR and self-supervised speech representation learning.
Duration & Distribution
The dataset contains 2,227 MP3 audio files with a combined duration of approximately 582 hours.
The files naturally fall into three nearly equal length categories:
- Short: 1–11 minutes
- Medium: 11–14 minutes
- Long: 14–61 minutes
This balanced distribution is especially beneficial for models that require varied utterance lengths and diverse acoustic environments.
Intended Use
This dataset is ideal for:
Speech Technology
- Training and finetuning ASR models (e.g., Wav2Vec2.0, HuBERT, Whisper, MMS).
- Pretraining self-supervised speech encoders for low-resource African languages.
- Developing acoustic models, segmentation systems, and forced aligners.
Research & Linguistics
- Studying Tigre phonetics, prosody, and dialectal variation.
- Supporting linguistic documentation and preservation efforts.
- Building evaluation benchmarks for East African low-resource speech processing.
Societal Impact
- Creating digital tools for accessibility, education, and public information.
- Expanding language technology inclusion for Eritrean languages.
- Supporting nonprofit and humanitarian applications requiring speech resources.
Ethical & Licensing Notes
- All recordings originate from publicly available radio broadcasts.
- The dataset is provided under CC BY-SA 4.0, allowing research and derivative works with attribution.
- Users must ensure responsible and culturally respectful use.
- The corpus must not be used for surveillance, profiling, or any harmful activity.
Acknowledgments
This dataset is made possible through the efforts of:
- Tigre-speaking contributors and archivists preserving audio material
- The broader Eritrean community supporting language resource creation
- Researchers working to expand technology access for low-resource languages
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