README.md

---
language:
- om
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
task_categories:
- automatic-speech-recognition
pretty_name: Sagalee — Oromo ASR Dataset
---

# Sagalee — Oromo ASR Dataset

This is a verbatim upload of the [Sagalee](https://openslr.org/157/) dataset, an open-source automatic speech recognition dataset for the Oromo language, originally released by Turi Abu et al. and accepted at ICASSP 2025.

> **License notice:** This dataset is released under [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) — use for commercial purposes is **not permitted**.

## Subset

Single subset `orm` (Oromo, ISO 639-2). No subset needed for single-language datasets.

## Splits

| Split | Speakers | Description |
|-------|----------|-------------|
| `train` | 259 | Training split |
| `dev` | 12 | Development split |
| `test` | 8 | Test split |

## Usage

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("hadamard-2/sagalee", "orm")
train = load_dataset("hadamard-2/sagalee", "orm", split="train")
```

## Schema

| Column | Type | Description |
|--------|------|-------------|
| `id` | string | Unique utterance identifier (e.g. `sagalee_SPKR014_007`) |
| `speaker_id` | string | Speaker identifier (e.g. `SPKR014`) |
| `transcription` | string | Text transcript of the audio |
| `language` | string | ISO 639-2 language code (`orm`) |
| `gender` | string | Speaker gender (`Male` or `Female`) |
| `age_group` | string | Self-declared age group of the speaker (e.g. `17-24`, `25-32`) |
| `dialect` | string | Self-declared Oromo dialect of the speaker (e.g. `Wallagga-Maccaa`, `Arsii-Baale`) |
| `audio` | Audio | Original audio at 24kHz |

> **Note:** Column descriptions reflect our best understanding from the official dataset documentation and direct inspection. We recommend cross-referencing with the [official repository](https://github.com/turinaf/sagalee) for authoritative definitions.

## Audio

Audio is stored as embedded binary at the original **24kHz** sampling rate. No resampling has been applied. No sampling rate metadata has been declared in the parquet files, as this is a verbatim archival upload and we did not want to risk incorrect metadata.

## Data Quality Notes

Four duplicate entries were found in `speaker_metadata.csv`:

| Speaker | Issue |
|---------|-------|
| `SPKR174` | Exact duplicate row |
| `SPKR036` | Exact duplicate row |
| `SPKR045` | Exact duplicate row |
| `SPKR032` | Conflicting metadata — same speaker ID with different `age_group` and `dialect` values |

For all cases the first occurrence was kept. `SPKR032`'s conflicting metadata is a known data quality issue in the original release.

## Dataset Statistics

- **Total**: ~100 hours of speech
- **Speakers**: 283 (150 Male, 133 Female)
- **Collection**: Crowdsourced via mobile app
- **Domain**: Read speech, clean and noisy environments
- **Language**: Afaan Oromoo (Oromo), widely spoken in Ethiopia and neighboring regions

## License

CC BY-NC 4.0 International. Use for non-commercial purposes only. Full license [here](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode).

## Attribution

Original dataset collected and released by Turi Abu, Ying Shi, Thomas Fang Zheng, and Dong Wang.

- Paper: [Sagalee: an Open Source Automatic Speech Recognition Dataset for Oromo Language](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00421)
- Source: [OpenSLR 157](https://openslr.org/157/)
- GitHub: [turinaf/sagalee](https://github.com/turinaf/sagalee)

## Citation

```bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{10890761,
  author={Abu, Turi and Shi, Ying and Zheng, Thomas Fang and Wang, Dong},
  booktitle={ICASSP 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
  title={Sagalee: an Open Source Automatic Speech Recognition Dataset for Oromo Language},
  year={2025},
  pages={1-5},
  doi={10.1109/ICASSP49660.2025.10890761}
}
```