Johnson Sewedo Okepefi
Author directory2026
NaijaS2ST: A Multi-Accent Benchmark for Speech-to-Speech Translation in Low-Resource Nigerian Languages
Marie Maltais | Yejin Jeon | Min Ma | Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad | Idris Abdulmumin | Maryam Ibrahim Mukhtar | Daud Abolade | Okepefi Joel Monday | Johnson Sewedo Okepefi | David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Marie Maltais | Yejin Jeon | Min Ma | Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad | Idris Abdulmumin | Maryam Ibrahim Mukhtar | Daud Abolade | Okepefi Joel Monday | Johnson Sewedo Okepefi | David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Speech translation for low-resource languages is constrained by the scarcity of high-quality parallel speech data, which is particularly pronounced in African linguistic contexts. To address this, we introduce , a parallel speech translation dataset covering Igbo, Hausa, , and Nigerian Pidgin paired with English. The dataset contains more than 40 hours of speech per language and includes several speaker and accent variations to reflect realistic settings. Using NaijaS2ST, we benchmark cascaded, end-to-end (E2E), and AudioLLM-based approaches across bidirectional translation directions (XX↔English). Our results show that few-shot audio LLMs are more effective than cascaded and E2E methods finetuned for speech-to-text translation. For speech-to-speech translation, however, cascaded and audio LLM paradigms perform comparatively, highlighting the need for stronger task-specific models. offers a strong foundation towards advancing research on low-resource multilingual speech translation. We open source the dataset here: [NaijaS2ST Huggingface Dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/McGill-NLP/NaijaS2ST); and the code here: [NaijaS2ST Code](https://github.com/McGill-NLP/naijas2st).