whisper-small-waxal-akan-continuation-v1

Whisper Small Waxal Akan Continuation v1

Experimental full-model continuation of teckedd/whisper_small-waxal_akan-asr-v1 on the Waxal Akan ASR split. This checkpoint is published for evaluation and Ghanaian listening review. It is not yet presented as a production or commercial-grade model.

Results

The primary comparison uses all 1,522 rows in the original held-out Waxal test split. The test set is excluded from training and checkpoint selection.

A 5,000-sample paired bootstrap estimates a 99.86% probability that the candidate improves the baseline. The 95% interval for candidate-minus-baseline WER is -1.90 to -0.33 percentage points. The candidate improves 524 utterances, ties 603, and worsens 395.

The smaller frozen benchmark v1 contains 99 utterances, three from each of 33 test-only speakers. On that subset, WER moves from 33.62% to 32.65% and CER from 12.37% to 12.26%. Its paired interval crosses zero, which is why the full held-out comparison is reported above.

On the complete 1,123-row validation split, WER improved from 32.69% before continuation to 31.45% at the selected step-300 checkpoint. Step 400 regressed to 31.83%, so the trainer restored step 300.

The stored Yoruba proxy prefix and no-forced-language decoding produced identical frozen benchmark predictions. This does not imply native Yoruba or Akan support in Whisper's original language-token inventory.

Training

• Base: teckedd/whisper_small-waxal_akan-asr-v1
• Dataset: google/WaxalNLP, aka_asr
• Valid rows: 10,106 train and 1,123 validation
• Labels: NFC, lowercase, punctuation removed, whitespace collapsed
• Method: full-model continuation, FP16, gradient checkpointing
• Hardware: NVIDIA L4 on Modal
• Effective batch size: 32
• Learning rate: 5e-6 with 50 warmup steps
• Validation/save interval: 100 steps
• Selected checkpoint: step 300 of 400

Intended Use

Research, evaluation, and prototyping for Akan speech recognition. Domain-specific systems for health, commerce, customer support, or public services require additional representative data, human review, privacy controls, and safety testing.

Limitations

• Trained on one public corpus and may not generalize across Akan dialects, domains, ages, recording devices, background noise, or code-switching.
• The measured full-test improvement is statistically credible but modest.
• Two of 1,522 candidate outputs entered severe token-repetition loops. Production inference should detect repeated-token collapse and retry or fall back to a reviewed baseline.
• Whisper's tokenizer fragments Akan text heavily; this run does not change the vocabulary.
• Do not use unreviewed transcripts for medical, legal, financial, or emergency decisions.

Training and evaluation code: https://github.com/teckedd-code2save/akan-speech-lab