MWirelabs/nagamese-asr

Nagamese ASR

Nagamese is a widely used creole language of Northeast India, spoken daily across communities as a bridge of communication.
Despite its reach and importance, it has long remained largely absent from modern speech technology.

This model demonstrates that Nagamese works with contemporary ASR systems-that spoken Nagamese can be recognized and transcribed in practical, real-world settings.

The goal of this project is to create the much needed presence and usability: making Nagamese visible, usable, and supported in today’s AI ecosystem with Nagamese Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).

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Model Details

• Base model: openai/whisper-small
• Language: Nagamese
• Task: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
• Framework: Transformers (PyTorch)
• Checkpoint format: safetensors

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Training Strategy

Stage 1 – Real Speech Training

• Dataset: Vaani (real Nagamese speech)
• ~12k utterances
• Byte-based audio loading (no HF audio decoding)
• Result: Strong language understanding, robust to noise

Stage 2 – Synthetic Polishing (Final Model)

• Dataset: Synthetic Nagamese TTS (~2k samples)
• Purpose:
  • Improve fluency
  • Fix incomplete word endings
  • Reduce hallucinations and instability
• Training:
  • Low learning rate
  • Short run (800 steps)
• Evaluation was always done on real Nagamese speech

This staged approach avoids synthetic bias while improving real-world usability.

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Evaluation Notes

• Raw WER is high due to noise tags and annotation artifacts in real data
• Qualitative evaluation shows:
  • Correct semantics
  • Improved fluency over Stage‑1
  • Better robustness to spontaneous speech

This model was selected based on human evaluation, not raw WER alone.

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Usage

from transformers import pipeline

asr = pipeline(
    "automatic-speech-recognition",
    model="MWirelabs/nagamese-asr"
)

asr("audio.wav")

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Limitations

• Designed specifically for Nagamese
• Not intended for multilingual or code-switched ASR
• Raw WER should not be used as the sole quality metric

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Acknowledgements

• OpenAI Whisper
• ARTPARK / IISc Vaani datasets
• Synthetic speech generated for research purposes

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Citation

Citation: https://huggingface.co/MWirelabs/nagamese-asr

@misc{mwirlabs_nagamese_asr_2026, title = {Nagamese ASR}, author = {MWire Labs}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/MWirelabs/nagamese-asr}}, note = {Stage-2 fine-tuned Whisper model for Nagamese speech recognition} }

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