Fine-tuning Whisper with Spontaneous Persian Speech (SPS)

Behnoosh Namdarzadeh, Nicolas Ballier


Abstract
This paper introduces the Spontaneous Persian Speech (SPS) dataset designed for automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks and a methodology laying the groundwork for addressing the shortage of spontaneous speech data. The corpus aims to support research on natural and conversational Persian, which remains under-represented in current ASR resources. The dataset consists of 694 minutes of audio from a total of 65 speakers, including 34 male and 31 female speakers. It contains 526,585 tokens. The audio segmentation step produces intervals of 1.24 to 3.25 seconds, each containing 3 to 9 words. The recordings cover a variety of environments, from inside cars to homes and shopping areas, including both busy and quiet settings. We use the SPS dataset to fine-tune Whisper and the performance increases significantly for both the small and medium models based on Word Error Rate (WER). This could be an initiative toward building domain-oriented datasets for specific ASR tasks.
Anthology ID:
2026.sigul-1.26
Volume:
Proceedings of the SIGUL 2026 Joint Workshop with ELE, EURALI, and DCLRL: Towards Inclusivity and Equality: Language Resources and Technologies for Under-Resourced and Endangered Languages
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, Sakriani Sakti, Claudia Soria, Maite Melero, John P. McCrae, Constantine Lignos, Chao-Hong Liu, German Rigau Claramunt, Georg Rehm
Venues:
SIGUL | EURALI | DCLRL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
263–269
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-sigul-26
DOI:
10.63317/2ca2yoj8fzgd
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Behnoosh Namdarzadeh and Nicolas Ballier. 2026. Fine-tuning Whisper with Spontaneous Persian Speech (SPS). In Proceedings of the SIGUL 2026 Joint Workshop with ELE, EURALI, and DCLRL: Towards Inclusivity and Equality: Language Resources and Technologies for Under-Resourced and Endangered Languages, pages 263–269, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Fine-tuning Whisper with Spontaneous Persian Speech (SPS) (Namdarzadeh & Ballier, SIGUL-EURALI-DCLRL 2026)
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