The IroyinSpeech Text Corpus: 24,905 Curated Yoruba Sentences for Speech and Language Technology

arXiv:2610.05366v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: IroyinSpeech is a 42-hour, 80-speaker Yoruba read-speech corpus whose audio has been distributed by ELRA since 2024. This paper describes the release of its text component: 24,905 unique, hand-verified, tone-marked Yoruba sentences (275,897 tokens; 15,687 types), curated in 2022 as recording prompts. Roughly 11,000 sentences were adapted from openly licensed news material; the remainder were written in-house to broaden coverage beyond the religious translation that dominates existing Yoruba corpora. Every sentence was checked by hand for tone-mark accuracy, edited for read-aloud clarity and a neutral register, and localised so that non-Yoruba personal and place names appear in Yoruba form. Preparing the text for release surfaced systematic Unicode normalisation failures affecting more than 60% of lines (with precomposed and decomposed forms of the same letter co-occurring within single sentences) which we document and correct. The corpus supports diacritic restoration, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, TTS front-end development and orthographic research, and serves as a validated prompt set for new recording.

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-10-08