Sometin Beta Pass Notin: Improving Multilingual ASR for Nigerian Languages via Knowledge Distillation

Excerpt

arXiv:2605.17710v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although modern multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems support several Nigerian languages, their performance consistently lags behind resource-rich languages such as English and French. Nigerian languages present unique modelling hurdles, including acute data scarcity, inconsistent orthography, tonal diacritics, diverse accents, frequent code-switching, and localised named entities. To address these challenges, we developed a m