WikIPA: Integrating WikiPron and Lingua Libre for Multilingual IPA Transcription

Pierluigi Cassotti, Jacob Lee Suchardt, Domenico De Cristofaro


Abstract
We present WikIPA, a new multilingual benchmark designed for automatic speech-to-IPA (STIPA) transcription. By integrating human-curated IPA transcriptions from WikiPron with spoken recordings and metadata from Lingua Libre, WikIPA connects textual phonetic representations with real speech across 78 languages. This open resource supports both broad (phonemic) and narrow (phonetic) transcription tasks, enabling fine-grained evaluation of multilingual phonetic transcription systems. WikIPA provides over 289,000 paired entries and serves as a large-scale foundation for STIPA. We benchmark several state-of-the-art STIPA systems, including MultIPA, (Lo)WhIPA, and ZIPA. Results show that ZIPA achieves the lowest mean error rates across most languages, outperforming Whisper- and Wav2Vec-based baselines. Error analyses reveal that remaining discrepancies largely stem from minor phonetic confusions rather than complete transcription failures, emphasizing the challenge of modeling fine-grained articulatory variation. WikIPA thus establishes the first systematic, multilingual evaluation framework for speech-to-IPA transcription and highlights the potential of combining open, community-driven resources to advance STIPA evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.668
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
8465–8475
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-668
DOI:
10.63317/2am4iw3bfhjb
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pierluigi Cassotti, Jacob Lee Suchardt, and Domenico De Cristofaro. 2026. WikIPA: Integrating WikiPron and Lingua Libre for Multilingual IPA Transcription. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 8465–8475, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
WikIPA: Integrating WikiPron and Lingua Libre for Multilingual IPA Transcription (Cassotti et al., LREC 2026)
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