--- license: cc-by-4.0 task_categories: - automatic-speech-recognition language: - fo pretty_name: FPSC size_categories: - 10K **FPSC: A Sustainable Pipeline for Building a Faroese Parliamentary Speech Corpus** > Dávid í Lág, Barbara Scalvini, Carlos Mena, Jón Guðnason > LREC 2026 The dataset represents the first large-scale corpus of natural spoken Faroese and is intended for: - Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) - Low-resource speech technology - Parliamentary speech analysis - Sociolinguistic research - Dialect research - Weakly supervised ASR training - Continual pretraining - Multilingual transfer learning --- # Dataset Structure The dataset follows the Hugging Face `Audio` dataset format and contains one row per parliamentary speech segment. Each entry contains: - segmented WAV audio - machine-generated transcript - parliamentary metadata - speaker metadata - dialect metadata - ROVER voting information - ASR ensemble metadata --- # Features ## Audio and Speech Fields | Field | Description | |---|---| | `audio` | Hugging Face `Audio` object containing the speech segment | | `audio_id` | Unique WAV filename for the speech segment | | `duration` | Audio duration in seconds | | `length` | Original segment length in seconds | | `audio_format` | Audio format (WAV) | | `sampling_rate` | Audio sample rate (16 kHz mono) | --- ## Transcript Fields | Field | Description | |---|---| | `text` | Final machine-generated transcript selected through ROVER voting | | `normalized_text` | Normalized version of the transcript for ASR training | | `winner_text` | Raw winning transcript from the ROVER voting process | | `language` | Spoken language of the segment (Faroese) | --- ## Speaker Metadata | Field | Description | |---|---| | `speaker_id` | Internal speaker identifier | | `mp_id` | Parliament member identifier | | `name` | Speaker name | | `gender` | Speaker gender | | `age` | Speaker age | | `age_group` | Speaker age group | | `date_of_birth` | Speaker date of birth | | `city` | Speaker home city | | `dialect` | Dialect region | | `political_party_affiliation` | Political party affiliation | | `mp_url` | URL to parliament member profile | --- ## Parliamentary Metadata | Field | Description | |---|---| | `id` | Unique speech segment ID | | `meeting_id` | Parliamentary meeting identifier | | `url` | URL to the original parliamentary meeting | | `date` | Meeting date | | `time` | Speech start time | | `second` | Start offset in seconds within the meeting | | `topic` | Parliamentary agenda topic | | `contribution_type` | Type of contribution (speech, remark, chair, etc.) | | `location` | Recording location | --- ## ROVER Voting Metadata The final transcripts were generated using an ensemble of four Faroese-adapted ASR systems combined through ROVER voting. | Field | Description | |---|---| | `rover_vote_type` | Type of ROVER voting decision | | `confidence` | Confidence score assigned by the voting system | | `winner_model_id` | Full Hugging Face model ID of the winning ASR model | | `winner_model_short` | Short name of the winning ASR model | | `costs` | Full ROVER voting cost dictionary stored as JSON | | `cost_wav2vec2_fo_cpt` | Voting cost for Wav2Vec2-FO-CPT | | `cost_whisper_fo` | Voting cost for Whisper-FO | | `cost_wav2vec2_fo` | Voting cost for Wav2Vec2-FO | | `cost_whisper_no_is_fo` | Voting cost for Whisper-NO/IS/FO | --- # ASR Models Used for Weak Transcription The corpus transcripts were generated using four Faroese-adapted ASR systems: | Model | Description | |---|---| | `Wav2Vec2-FO-CPT` | Continually pretrained Wav2Vec2 XLS-R model adapted on Faroese parliamentary speech | | `Wav2Vec2-FO` | Faroese fine-tuned Wav2Vec2 XLS-R model | | `Whisper-FO` | Whisper Large model fine-tuned on Faroese speech | | `Whisper-NO/IS/FO` | Multilingual Whisper model fine-tuned on Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese | The final transcript for each segment was selected using weighted ROVER voting based on ASR model performance. --- # Transcript Quality Notice The transcripts in FPSC are automatically generated and should be treated as **weakly supervised labels**, not manually verified gold-standard transcriptions. Although the corpus was generated using multiple ASR systems and ROVER consensus voting, transcription errors remain present, especially for: - overlapping speech - dialect variation - named entities - interruptions - spontaneous parliamentary speech The dataset is therefore most suitable for: - weakly supervised ASR training - continual pretraining - large-scale speech modeling - speech representation learning - sociolinguistic analysis --- # Loading the Dataset ```python from datasets import load_dataset, Audio ds = load_dataset("davidilag/FPSC") ds = ds.cast_column("audio", Audio(sampling_rate=16000)) print(ds) print(ds["train"][0]) ``` --- # Citation If you use FPSC in your research, please cite: ```bibtex @inproceedings{iLag2026FPSC, author = {Dávid í Lág and Barbara Scalvini and Carlos Mena and Jón Guðnason}, title = {{FPSC}: A Sustainable Pipeline for Building a Faroese Parliamentary Speech Corpus}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026)}, year = {2026}, address = {Palma de Mallorca, Spain}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, institution = {University of the Faroe Islands}, keywords = {Faroese, Parliamentary Speech, Automatic Speech Recognition, Weakly-Supervised Transcription, Whisper, Wav2Vec2}, abstract = {We present FPSC, a 1,600-hour Faroese parliamentary speech corpus comprising approximately 89,000 speeches enriched with detailed speaker and linguistic metadata. The corpus was constructed using a sustainable ASR-assisted pipeline combining speech segmentation, multiple Faroese-adapted ASR systems, and ROVER-based consensus voting for weakly supervised transcription. FPSC represents the first large-scale corpus of natural spoken Faroese and provides an open resource for future research in automatic speech recognition and low-resource language technology.} } ``` --- # Repository and Scripts Processing scripts and pipeline implementation: - GitHub repository: https://github.com/davidilag/LREC2026 --- # Original Data Source The original parliamentary recordings and metadata were collected from the official website of *Løgtingið*, the Parliament of the Faroe Islands: https://www.logting.fo/mal/yvirlit/gerdabokur/ The website provides publicly accessible: - parliamentary meeting recordings - agendas and meeting protocols - speaker order and timestamps - meeting dates and metadata - parliament member information FPSC was constructed by automatically downloading, processing, segmenting, and transcribing these publicly available parliamentary sessions into a structured speech corpus suitable for ASR and language technology research. --- # License This dataset is released under the CC BY 4.0 license. The recordings originate from publicly available parliamentary broadcasts from *Løgtingið*, the Parliament of the Faroe Islands. --- # Contact **Dávid í Lág** University of the Faroe Islands MSc. Computer Science, Ph.D. student in Computer Science (2024-2028) Research area: Automatic Speech Recognition for Low-Resource Languages