Building Community-Centred NLP Resources for Puno Quechua
Jul 3, 2026·
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Elwin Huaman
Adrian Gamarra Lafuente
Johanna Cordova
Anna Korhonen
Image credit: Elwin HuamanAbstract
The preservation of under-resourced languages requires digital tools and resources shaped by and for their speakers. We present the first dedicated ASR resources for Puno Quechua (ISO 639-3: qxp): (1) the largest speech corpus for any single Quechua variety, consisting in 66 hours of recordings for scripted and spontaneous speech (including 36 hours of manually transcribed and validated data), collected via a participatory design campaign; (2) the first systematic ASR benchmark for Puno Quechua, evaluating state-of-the-art models and fine-tuning Whisper-base, wav2vec2-base, and XLS-R-300M, with and without continued pre-training (CPT); (3) an open release of all datasets and fine-tuned models.
Type
Publication
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)
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Research Engineer
Elwin Huaman is a Quechuan Researcher from Nuñoa Peru, working in the Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. He has experience creating Knowledge Graphs within the civil society, academia and industry. He has co-authored the book: Knowledge Graphs - Methodology, Tools and Selected Use Cases, and is founder of QuechuaBase, a knowledge base ecosystem that supports a harmonization process of the language and knowledge of Quechua communities across the world while promoting their agency and digital inclusion.
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