SiTa - Sinhala and Tamil Speaker Diarization Dataset in the Wild

Uthayasanker Thayasivam, Thulasithan Gnanenthiram, Shamila Jeewantha, Upeksha Jayawickrama


Abstract
The dynamic field of speaker diarization continues to present significant challenges, despite notable advancements in recent years and the rising focus on complex acoustic scenarios emphasizes the importance of sustained research efforts in this area. While speech resources for speaker diarization are expanding rapidly, aided by semi-automated techniques, many existing datasets remain outdated and lack authentic real-world conversational data. This challenge is particularly acute for low-resource South Asian languages, due to limited public media data and reduced research efforts. Sinhala and Tamil are two such languages with limited speaker diarization datasets. To address this gap, we introduce a new speaker diarization dataset for these languages and evaluate multiple existing models to assess their performance. This work provides essential resources, a novel dataset and valuable insights from model benchmarks to advance speaker diarization for low-resource languages, particularly Sinhala and Tamil.
Anthology ID:
2025.chipsal-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2025)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran, Ashwini Vaidya, Bal Krishna Bal, Sana Shams, Surendrabikram Thapa
Venues:
CHiPSAL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
83–92
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.chipsal-1.8/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Uthayasanker Thayasivam, Thulasithan Gnanenthiram, Shamila Jeewantha, and Upeksha Jayawickrama. 2025. SiTa - Sinhala and Tamil Speaker Diarization Dataset in the Wild. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2025), pages 83–92, Abu Dhabi, UAE. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SiTa - Sinhala and Tamil Speaker Diarization Dataset in the Wild (Thayasivam et al., CHiPSAL 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.chipsal-1.8.pdf