Tone-Conditioned Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Bantu Speech Recognition
Southern Bantu languages are spoken by over 80 million people, yet current foundation ASR models still produce zero-shot WER above 100%, which limits practical use in education and public services. We addressed this gap with a tone conditioned curriculum framework for 6 Southern Bantu languages that combined hybrid difficulty scoring, gated adapters driven by tonal statistics and staged curriculum training. We trained on a community corpus and tested transfer to NCHLT to measure robustness beyond matched evaluation. Results revealed clear interactions between architecture and language, with W2V-BERT outperforming Whisper on Nguni languages by 3 to 4 WER points whilst Whisper performed bet...
| Authors | Kesego Mokgosi, Vukosi Marivate, Sitwala Mundia et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 30 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 June 2026 |
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