From Speech to Text Corpora: Evaluating ASR-Based Data Acquisition for Low-Resource Fongbe and Hausa
arXiv:2606.22274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-resource African languages lack text corpora needed for language model training. We investigate whether ASR pipelines can extend text resources for two typologically distinct West African languages: Fongbe (tonal, diacritic-rich) and Hausa (non-tonal). We fine-tune MMS-300M on a curated 12.3-hour Fongbe dataset, achieving 9.48% WER on the ALFFA benchmark - a 78% relative reduction from the prior 44.04% baseline - while preserving tonal diacriti