Building an ASR Solution for Training and Assessing Children's Reading
Automatic speech recognition for children's reading remains underdeveloped for most African languages, including Bambara, despite its potential value for reproducible literacy assessment. We present an open-source system for assessing children's reading in Bambara, developed through an end-to-end process linking field data collection, benchmark construction, model adaptation, a reading application, and classroom validation. A mobile collection and assessment app was used to collect 55 hours of raw reading speech from 60 children, from which we construct a public benchmark for Bambara child-reading assessment. Fine-tuning experiments compare Soloni, a Bambara-adapted Fast-Conformer ASR fra...
| Authors | Yacouba Diarra, Nouhoum Souleymane Coulibaly, Mamadou Dembele et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 30 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 June 2026 |
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