INEL Evenki Speech Corpus

INEL Evenki Speech Corpus

Overview

This dataset is a machine-learning-ready subset of the INEL Evenki Corpus (Version 2.0), processed specifically for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) / Speech-to-Text (STT) training under the Mozilla Data Collective initiative. It translates the highly detailed EXMARaLDA XML annotations into the standard tabular layout utilized by Mozilla Common Voice.

About the Evenki People and Language

Evenki (ISO 639-3: `evn`) belongs to the Northern subgroup of the Tungusic language family. It is spoken across a vast territory in Eastern Siberia—stretching from the Yenisei river to the Pacific Ocean—as well as in parts of China and Mongolia. Due to this wide geographical distribution, Evenki exhibits a highly developed dialectal division, comprising Northern, Southern, and Eastern groups. With under 5,000 speakers in the Russian Federation according to recent censuses, and under heavy influence from Russian, Yakut, and Buryat, Evenki is considered an endangered language.

Statistics

• Language: Evenki (`evn`)

• Total Speakers: 6

• Total Audio Clips: 2180 sentences

• Total Audio Duration: 02:39:46 (HH:MM:SS)

• Audio Format: MP3

Data Format

The dataset provides audio clips aligned at the sentence level alongside a `train.tsv` metadata file.

The `train.tsv` contains the following Common Voice conforming fields:

• `client_id`: Unique speaker abbreviation.

• `path`: The filename of the corresponding audio clip.

• `sentence`: The primary transcribed text of the audio.

• `age`: The calculated age of the speaker at the time of recording.

• `gender`: `male` or `female`.

• `accents`: Specific dialect information (e.g., Ilimpi, Taimyr, Sym, Barhahan).

• `locale`: Locale code (`evn`).

Understanding the Text Columns

The original corpus contains multiple transcription tiers. To ensure every audio clip has a primary transcription for STT training, the `sentence` column is dynamically populated using a strict fallback hierarchy:

1. `st`: Source transcription (Cyrillic orthography).

2. `stl`: Source transcription (Latin script).

3. `ts`: Phonological transcription (IPA-like characters).

Because the `sentence` field can contain Cyrillic, Latin, or Phonological text depending on the original file's availability, the raw `st`, `stl`, and `ts` columns are also preserved in the TSV. To programmatically determine which alphabet/tier was used for the `sentence` column on any given row, consumers can simply test for equality: `sentence == st`, `sentence == stl`, or `sentence == ts`.

Note: To maintain a streamlined, single-task focus on Speech-to-Text modeling, extensive linguistic annotations such as morphological glossing and secondary translations (English, German, Russian) have been excluded from this specific audio dataset. A separate parallel-text dataset may be released in the future.

Dataset Alphabet

The following represents all unique characters encountered in the `sentence` column of this dataset. They are sorted by uppercase, then lowercase, and finally all other symbols:

T А Б В Г Д Е Ж З И К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Э Ю Я Ң Ӈ Ӣ k n o u w а б в г д е ж з и й к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я ё ғ ң һ ӈ ӣ ӯ ! " ( ) , - . 2 8 : ? « » ̄ – — “ ” …

Copyright, License & Required Citation

Created within the long-term INEL project ("Grammatical Descriptions, Corpora and Language Technology for Indigenous Northern Eurasian Languages").

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Required Citation: If you use this dataset in your research, training runs, or derivative works, please cite the source corpus as follows:

Däbritz, Chris Lasse; Gusev, Valentin; Stoynova, Natalia. 2024. INEL Evenki Corpus. Version 2.0. Publication date 2024-12-31. https://hdl.handle.net/11022/0000-0007-FE38-D. Archived at Universität Hamburg. In: The INEL corpora of indigenous Northern Eurasian languages. https://hdl.handle.net/11022/0000-0007-F45A-1