Data Quality Issues in Multilingual Speech Datasets: The Need for Sociolinguistic Awareness and Proactive Language Planning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Lau, Mingfei, Chen, Qian, Fang, Yeming, Xu, Tingting, Chen, Tongzhou, Golik, Pavel
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Lau, Mingfei
Chen, Qian
Fang, Yeming
Xu, Tingting
Chen, Tongzhou
Golik, Pavel
author_facet Lau, Mingfei
Chen, Qian
Fang, Yeming
Xu, Tingting
Chen, Tongzhou
Golik, Pavel
contents Our quality audit for three widely used public multilingual speech datasets - Mozilla Common Voice 17.0, FLEURS, and Vox Populi - shows that in some languages, these datasets suffer from significant quality issues, which may obfuscate downstream evaluation results while creating an illusion of success. We divide these quality issues into two categories: micro-level and macro-level. We find that macro-level issues are more prevalent in less institutionalized, often under-resourced languages. We provide a case analysis of Taiwanese Southern Min (nan_tw) that highlights the need for proactive language planning (e.g. orthography prescriptions, dialect boundary definition) and enhanced data quality control in the dataset creation process. We conclude by proposing guidelines and recommendations to mitigate these issues in future dataset development, emphasizing the importance of sociolinguistic awareness and language planning principles. Furthermore, we encourage research into how this creation process itself can be leveraged as a tool for community-led language planning and revitalization.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Data Quality Issues in Multilingual Speech Datasets: The Need for Sociolinguistic Awareness and Proactive Language Planning
Lau, Mingfei
Chen, Qian
Fang, Yeming
Xu, Tingting
Chen, Tongzhou
Golik, Pavel
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Our quality audit for three widely used public multilingual speech datasets - Mozilla Common Voice 17.0, FLEURS, and Vox Populi - shows that in some languages, these datasets suffer from significant quality issues, which may obfuscate downstream evaluation results while creating an illusion of success. We divide these quality issues into two categories: micro-level and macro-level. We find that macro-level issues are more prevalent in less institutionalized, often under-resourced languages. We provide a case analysis of Taiwanese Southern Min (nan_tw) that highlights the need for proactive language planning (e.g. orthography prescriptions, dialect boundary definition) and enhanced data quality control in the dataset creation process. We conclude by proposing guidelines and recommendations to mitigate these issues in future dataset development, emphasizing the importance of sociolinguistic awareness and language planning principles. Furthermore, we encourage research into how this creation process itself can be leveraged as a tool for community-led language planning and revitalization.
title Data Quality Issues in Multilingual Speech Datasets: The Need for Sociolinguistic Awareness and Proactive Language Planning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17525