Portrait of Luel Hagos Beyene

Luel Hagos Beyene

Research Intern - McGill University
Supervisor
David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Website
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Publications

OpenBibleTTS: Large-Scale Speech Resources and TTS Models for Low-Resource Languages
David Guzmán
Luel Hagos Beyene
Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi
Yejin Jeon
Dietrich Klakow
David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Recent advances in neural text-to-speech (TTS) and multilingual speech generation have substantially improved synthetic speech quality, yet … (see more)these gains remain unevenly distributed across the world's languages. Existing models are still dominated by a small set of high-resource languages, while many studies of low-resource TTS are simulated on artificially downsampled high-resource corpora that do not reflect the orthographic variation and limited phonetic coverage encountered in genuinely underrepresented settings. As such, we introduce OpenBibleTTS, which is a large-scale benchmark for low-resource speech synthesis spanning 37 underrepresented languages. Moreover, a systematic comparison of various TTS architectures and large-scale speech generation models is conducted across in-domain Biblical text and out-of-domain material. Results show that no single system dominates across languages and metrics: Gemini-TTS achieves the highest listener ratings on most evaluated languages, but monolingual EveryVoice models trained on OpenBibleTTS remain strongest for intelligibility and are preferred in several African languages, while open from-scratch systems degrade sharply on out-of-domain text, revealing a persistent gap between broad multilingual coverage and reliable synthesis quality in underserved linguistic communities. We complement automatic evaluation with subjective human judgments, and open-source all processed datasets, alignments, and trained models to support future low-resource TTS research.
2026-06-07
arXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Ibom NLP: A Step Toward Inclusive Natural Language Processing for Nigeria's Minority Languages
Oluwadara Kalejaiye
Luel Hagos Beyene
David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Mmekut-Mfon Gabriel Edet
A. D. Akpan
Eno-Abasi Urua
Anietie U Andy
2025-11-08
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
mSTEB: Massively Multilingual Evaluation of LLMs on Speech and Text Tasks
Luel Hagos Beyene
Vivek Verma
Min Ma
Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi
Fabian David Schmidt
Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende
David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of tasks, including in multimodal settings such as spe… (see more)ech. However, their evaluation is often limited to English and a few high-resource languages. For low-resource languages, there is no standardized evaluation benchmark. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing mSTEB, a new benchmark to evaluate the performance of LLMs on a wide range of tasks covering language identification, text classification, question answering, and translation tasks on both speech and text modalities. We evaluated the performance of leading LLMs such as Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o (Audio) and state-of-the-art open models such as Qwen 2 Audio and Gemma 3 27B. Our evaluation shows a wide gap in performance between high-resource and low-resource languages, especially for languages spoken in Africa and Americas/Oceania. Our findings show that more investment is needed to address their under-representation in LLMs coverage.
2025-06-09
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org