README.md

---
language:
- gl
license: apache-2.0
base_model: openai/whisper-base
tags:
- whisper-event
- generated_from_trainer
datasets:
- mozilla-foundation/common_voice_13_0
metrics:
- wer
model-index:
- name: Whisper Base Galician
  results:
  - task:
      name: Automatic Speech Recognition
      type: automatic-speech-recognition
    dataset:
      name: mozilla-foundation/common_voice_13_0 gl
      type: mozilla-foundation/common_voice_13_0
      config: gl
      split: test
      args: gl
    metrics:
    - name: Wer
      type: wer
      value: 17.290976821192054
---

# Whisper Base Galician

## Model summary

**Whisper Base Galician** is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for **Galician (gl)** speech. It is fine-tuned from [openai/whisper-base] on the **Galician portion of Mozilla Common Voice 13.0**, achieving a **Word Error Rate (WER) of 17.29%** on the Common Voice evaluation split.

This model provides a balance between performance and model size, suitable for medium-scale transcription tasks in Galician.

---

## Model description

* **Architecture:** Transformer-based encoder–decoder (Whisper)
* **Base model:** openai/whisper-base
* **Language:** Galician (gl)
* **Task:** Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
* **Output:** Text transcription in Galician
* **Decoding:** Autoregressive sequence-to-sequence decoding

Leveraging Whisper’s multilingual pretraining, this base model is fine-tuned on Galician speech data to provide accurate transcription for a low-resource language, appropriate for research, educational, and media applications.

---

## Intended use

### Primary use cases

* Accurate transcription of Galician audio recordings
* Offline or batch ASR pipelines
* Research and development in Galician ASR
* Media, educational, and archival transcription tasks

### Intended users

* Researchers working on Galician or low-resource ASR
* Developers building Galician speech applications
* Academic or institutional users

### Out-of-scope use

* Real-time or low-latency ASR without optimization
* Speech translation tasks
* Safety-critical applications without validation

---

## Limitations and known issues

* Performance may degrade on:
  * Noisy or low-quality recordings
  * Conversational or spontaneous speech
  * Accents underrepresented in Common Voice
* Transcription errors may occur under challenging acoustic conditions
* Dataset biases from Common Voice may be reflected in outputs

Users are encouraged to evaluate the model on their own data before deployment.

---

## Training and evaluation data

### Training data

* **Dataset:** Mozilla Common Voice 13.0 (Galician subset)
* **Data type:** Crowd-sourced, read speech
* **Preprocessing:**
  * Audio resampled to 16 kHz
  * Text normalized using Whisper tokenizer
  * Filtering of invalid or problematic samples

### Evaluation data

* **Dataset:** Mozilla Common Voice 13.0 (Galician evaluation split)
* **Metric:** Word Error Rate (WER)

---

## Evaluation results

| Metric     | Value      |
| ---------- | ---------- |
| WER (eval) | **17.29%** |

This reflects the expected performance of a base Whisper model fine-tuned for Galician.

---

## Training procedure

### Training hyperparameters

* Learning rate: 2.5e-5
* Optimizer: Adam (β1=0.9, β2=0.999, ε=1e-8)
* LR scheduler: Linear
* Warmup steps: 500
* Training steps: 5,000
* Train batch size: 128
* Evaluation batch size: 64
* Seed: 42
* Mixed precision training: Native AMP

### Training results (summary)

| Training Loss | Epoch | Step | Validation Loss | WER     |
|:-------------:|:-----:|:----:|:---------------:|:-------:|
| 0.372         | 10.0  | 1000 | 0.4173          | 21.0023 |
| 0.1352        | 20.0  | 2000 | 0.3982          | 18.3620 |
| 0.0638        | 30.0  | 3000 | 0.4175          | 17.8842 |
| 0.0371        | 40.0  | 4000 | 0.4310          | 17.4721 |
| 0.0279        | 50.0  | 5000 | 0.4360          | 17.2910 |

---

## Framework versions

- Transformers 4.37.2  
- PyTorch 2.2.0+cu121  
- Datasets 2.16.1  
- Tokenizers 0.15.1  

---

## How to use

```python
from transformers import pipeline

hf_model = "HiTZ/whisper-base-gl"  # replace with actual repo ID
device = 0  # set to -1 for CPU

pipe = pipeline(
    task="automatic-speech-recognition",
    model=hf_model,
    device=device
)

result = pipe("audio.wav")
print(result["text"])
```

---

## Ethical considerations and risks

* This model transcribes speech and may process personal data.
* Users should ensure compliance with applicable data protection laws (e.g., GDPR).
* The model should not be used for surveillance or non-consensual audio processing.

---

## Citation

If you use this model in your research, please cite:

```bibtex
@misc{dezuazo2025whisperlmimprovingasrmodels,
  title={Whisper-LM: Improving ASR Models with Language Models for Low-Resource Languages},
  author={Xabier de Zuazo and Eva Navas and Ibon Saratxaga and Inma Hernáez Rioja},
  year={2025},
  eprint={2503.23542},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.CL}
}
```

Please, check the related paper preprint in
[arXiv:2503.23542](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23542)
for more details.

---

## License

This model is available under the
[Apache-2.0 License](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0).
You are free to use, modify, and distribute this model as long as you credit
the original creators.

---

## Contact and attribution

* Fine-tuning and evaluation: HiTZ/Aholab - Basque Center for Language Technology
* Base model: OpenAI Whisper
* Dataset: Mozilla Common Voice

For questions or issues, please open an issue in the model repository.