kalbin/yubao_sites

中國語言保護 YuBao: A New Chinese Dialect Speech Benchmark

Paper | GitHub

The Chinese Language Resources Protection Project Collection and Display Platform (nicknamed YuBao / 語保) contains speech, dialect transcripts, phonetic (IPA) transcriptions, and Mandarin translations across 1,300+ sites in China.

This repository (yubao_sites) contains the metadata for all Chinese dialect sites, including site IDs, site names, and linguistic subgroupings (e.g., Mandarin, Yue, Min, Hakka, Xiang, Wu, and Gan). This serves as a foundational component for the Chinese dialect speech-to-speech retrieval benchmark introduced in the paper "Towards Comprehensive Semantic Speech Embeddings for Chinese Dialects."

Data Structure

The dataset contains the following features:

• site_id: Unique identifier for the collection point.
• site: The location name (Province_City_District).
• subgrouping: The major Chinese dialect subgroup.
• sentences: A list of parallel sentences available for that site.

Usage

You can download the site metadata using the Hugging Face CLI:

hf download kalbin/yubao_sites --repo-type dataset

To assemble the full retrieval benchmark, please follow the instructions in the official GitHub repository.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the following:

@article{chang2026yubao,
    author  = {Kalvin Chang and Yiwen Shao and Jiahong Li and Dong Yu},
    title = {Towards Comprehensive Semantic Speech Embeddings for Chinese Dialects},
    journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv: 2601.07274},
    year = {2026}
}

@misc{yubao,
  author       = {{Centre for the Protection of Language Resources of China}},
  title = {The Chinese Language Resources Protection Project Collection and Display Platform},
  url          = "https://zhongguoyuyan.cn",
  month        = "",
  year         = 2023,
  annote       = ""
}

@inproceedings{ma-etal-2025-cross,
    title = "Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Speech Translation",
    author = "Ma, Rao  and
      Qian, Mengjie  and
      Fathullah, Yassir  and
      Tang, Siyuan  and
      Gales, Mark  and
      Knill, Kate",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-short.4/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-short.4",
}

License

The audio and video copyrights belong to the Centre for the Protection of Language Resources of China.