Which one Performs Better? Wav2Vec or Whisper? Applying both in Badini Kurdish Speech to Text (BKSTT)

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Adnan, Renas, Hassani, Hossein
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918124557697024
author Adnan, Renas
Hassani, Hossein
author_facet Adnan, Renas
Hassani, Hossein
contents Speech-to-text (STT) systems have a wide range of applications. They are available in many languages, albeit at different quality levels. Although Kurdish is considered a less-resourced language from a processing perspective, SST is available for some of the Kurdish dialects, for instance, Sorani (Central Kurdish). However, that is not applied to other Kurdish dialects, Badini and Hawrami, for example. This research is an attempt to address this gap. Bandin, approximately, has two million speakers, and STT systems can help their community use mobile and computer-based technologies while giving their dialect more global visibility. We aim to create a language model based on Badini's speech and evaluate its performance. To cover a conversational aspect, have a proper confidence level of grammatical accuracy, and ready transcriptions, we chose Badini kids' stories, eight books including 78 stories, as the textual input. Six narrators narrated the books, which resulted in approximately 17 hours of recording. We cleaned, segmented, and tokenized the input. The preprocessing produced nearly 15 hours of speech, including 19193 segments and 25221 words. We used Wav2Vec2-Large-XLSR-53 and Whisper-small to develop the language models. The experiments indicate that the transcriptions process based on the Wav2Vec2-Large-XLSR-53 model provides a significantly more accurate and readable output than the Whisper-small model, with 90.38% and 65.45% readability, and 82.67% and 53.17% accuracy, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_09957
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Which one Performs Better? Wav2Vec or Whisper? Applying both in Badini Kurdish Speech to Text (BKSTT)
Adnan, Renas
Hassani, Hossein
Computation and Language
Speech-to-text (STT) systems have a wide range of applications. They are available in many languages, albeit at different quality levels. Although Kurdish is considered a less-resourced language from a processing perspective, SST is available for some of the Kurdish dialects, for instance, Sorani (Central Kurdish). However, that is not applied to other Kurdish dialects, Badini and Hawrami, for example. This research is an attempt to address this gap. Bandin, approximately, has two million speakers, and STT systems can help their community use mobile and computer-based technologies while giving their dialect more global visibility. We aim to create a language model based on Badini's speech and evaluate its performance. To cover a conversational aspect, have a proper confidence level of grammatical accuracy, and ready transcriptions, we chose Badini kids' stories, eight books including 78 stories, as the textual input. Six narrators narrated the books, which resulted in approximately 17 hours of recording. We cleaned, segmented, and tokenized the input. The preprocessing produced nearly 15 hours of speech, including 19193 segments and 25221 words. We used Wav2Vec2-Large-XLSR-53 and Whisper-small to develop the language models. The experiments indicate that the transcriptions process based on the Wav2Vec2-Large-XLSR-53 model provides a significantly more accurate and readable output than the Whisper-small model, with 90.38% and 65.45% readability, and 82.67% and 53.17% accuracy, respectively.
title Which one Performs Better? Wav2Vec or Whisper? Applying both in Badini Kurdish Speech to Text (BKSTT)
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09957