EuroSpeech: A Multilingual Speech Corpus

Samuel Pfisterer, Florian Grötschla, Luca A Lanzendörfer, Florian Yan, Roger Wattenhofer

Keywords: speech corpus, multilingual speech processing, automatic speech recognition

Abstract: Recent progress in speech processing has highlighted that high-quality performance across languages requires substantial training data for each individual language. While existing multilingual datasets cover many languages, they often contain insufficient data for each language, leading to models trained on these datasets to exhibit poor performance on most supported languages. Our work addresses this challenge by introducing a scalable pipeline for constructing speech datasets from parliamentary recordings. The proposed pipeline includes robust components for media retrieval and a two-stage alignment algorithm designed to handle non-verbatim transcripts and long-form audio. Applying this pipeline to recordings from 22 European parliaments, we extract over 61k hours of aligned speech segments, achieving substantial per-language coverage with 19 languages exceeding 1k hours and 22 languages exceeding 500 hours of high-quality speech data. We obtain an average 41.8\% reduction in word error rates over baselines when finetuning an existing ASR model on our dataset, demonstrating the usefulness of our approach.

Dataset URL: https://huggingface.co/datasets/disco-eth/EuroSpeech

Code URL: https://github.com/SamuelPfisterer/EuroSpeech

Primary Area: Applications of Datasets & Benchmarks for in speech and audio

Submission Number: 2326