Whisper Large V3 - Kinyarwanda (Standard Speech)
Fine-tuned version of openai/whisper-large-v3 for automatic speech recognition on standard Kinyarwanda speech.
Note on language token
Whisper's supported language set does not include Kinyarwanda. This model was trained using the sw (Swahili) language token as a substitute, since it is one of the closer supported languages available.
Use language="sw" at inference time — this is expected and required, not an error.
Dataset
Source data is DigitalUmuganda/Afrivoice_Kinyarwanda (CC-BY-4.0), a Kinyarwanda ASR dataset from Digital Umuganda. The training dataset used here, ElizabethMwangi/kinyarwanda_afrivoice_all_domains_v0.1, was created by extracting and concatenating 5 of its domains:
- Agriculture
- Education
- Financial
- Government
- Health
Note: scripted_education subset was excluded due to corrupted files.
Training Configuration
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Base model | openai/whisper-large-v3 |
| Language token used | sw (Kinyarwanda is not natively supported by Whisper; see note above) |
| Task | transcribe |
| Encoder updated | Yes |
| Decoder updated | Yes |
| Projection updated | Yes |
| Trainable parameters | 1,543,490,560 (full model) |
| Batch size | 32 |
| Learning rate | 1e-5 |
| LR scheduler | polynomial (power=4, warmup=100 steps, end=1e-8) |
| Precision | fp16 |
| Max steps | 500 |
Results
Evaluated on held-out validation data at step 500:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Validation Loss | 0.2997 |
| WER | 0.2044 |
| CER | 0.0626 |
WER and CER improved consistently from step 0 (WER 0.93, CER 0.34) through step 500, with both training and validation loss decreasing steadily and no signs of overfitting at this point in training.
Usage
from transformers import WhisperProcessor, WhisperForConditionalGeneration
processor = WhisperProcessor.from_pretrained("ElizabethMwangi/whisper-large-v3_finetuned_kinyarwanda_standard_speech_v1.0", language="sw", task="transcribe")
model = WhisperForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("ElizabethMwangi/whisper-large-v3_finetuned_kinyarwanda_standard_speech_v1.0")
Limitations
This model was trained on standard (non-impaired) Kinyarwanda speech across five domains. Performance on non-standard or impaired speech, or domains outside those listed above, has not been evaluated. Because Whisper does not natively support Kinyarwanda, this model repurposes the sw language token