Datasets:
File size: 5,388 Bytes
8f11ba9 6803e13 8f11ba9 fc2f08f 8f11ba9 |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 |
---
license: other
language:
- rki
pretty_name: RFA Rakhine Language Voices
tags:
- audio
- asr
- speech-recognition
- rakhine
- arakanese
- webdataset
- myanmar
task_categories:
- automatic-speech-recognition
- audio-classification
- voice-activity-detection
language_creators:
- found
source_datasets:
- original
---
# RFA Rakhine Language Voices
This dataset contains **14.53 hours** of audio in the **Rakhine (Arakanese)** language, sourced from news broadcasts by **Radio Free Asia (RFA) Burmese**. This is one of the largest publicly accessible audio resources for the Rakhine language, designed to support research in low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR), voice activity detection, and other speech-related tasks.
The audio has been automatically segmented into manageable chunks and prepared in the efficient [WebDataset](https://github.com/webdataset/webdataset) format. It includes rich metadata extracted from the original YouTube videos, but **does not contain transcriptions**, making it ideal for self-supervised pre-training or tasks that do not require text.
### Acknowledgments
This dataset was made possible by the journalists and broadcasters at **Radio Free Asia (RFA)** who produce and publish high-quality content in the languages of Myanmar.
## Dataset Structure & Format
This dataset follows the [WebDataset](https://github.com/webdataset/webdataset) format. Each sample consists of two paired files inside a `.tar.gz` archive:
- `XXXX.mp3` — the audio chunk
- `XXXX.json` — the corresponding metadata (UTF-8 JSON)
🟢 **Minimum chunk duration:** 1.06 seconds
🔴 **Maximum chunk duration:** 15.02 seconds
Each `.json` file contains a rich set of fields preserved from the original YouTube video:
```json
{
"__key__": "T3bJyuBI0Bw_chunk_0000",
"file_name": "T3bJyuBI0Bw_chunk_0000.mp3",
"title": "ရခိုင်တိုင်းရင်းသားဘာသာအစီအစဉ်",
"uploader": "RFA လွတ်လပ်တဲ့အာရှအသံ",
"channel_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE75dgnEYPacknHHg3a3sJg",
"upload_date": "20250118",
"duration": 15.0,
"video_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3bJyuBI0Bw",
"thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/T3bJyuBI0Bw/maxresdefault.jpg",
"description": "ရခိုင်တိုင်းရင်းသားဘာသာအစီအစဉ် \n~~~\n■ စစ်ကောင်စီ ဗုံးကြဲတိုက်ခိုက်မှုကြောင့် AA ထိန်းချုပ်နယ်မြေမှာ အရပ်သား ၄၃ ဦး သေဆုံး...",
"tags": ["Radio Free Asia", "Burma", "Myanmar", "news"],
"view_count": 1312,
"like_count": 27,
"language": "rki",
"original_video_id": "T3bJyuBI0Bw"
}
```
## Usage Example
You can easily stream this dataset using the Hugging Face `datasets` library. The `streaming=True` mode is highly recommended.
```python
from datasets import load_dataset
dataset = load_dataset(
"freococo/rfa_rakhine_language_voices",
split="train",
streaming=True
)
for sample in dataset.take(5):
print(sample["audio"]) # Audio object with decoded waveform
print(sample["json"]["title"]) # Access metadata from the JSON
print(f"Duration: {sample['json']['duration']}s")
```
## Known Limitations
This dataset was created using an automated pipeline and has the following characteristics:
- **No Transcriptions:** This dataset is audio-only and does not include text transcriptions.
- **Background Noise:** As the audio is sourced from news broadcasts, some segments may contain background music, jingles, or other non-speech sounds.
- **No Speaker Labels:** The dataset does not differentiate between different speakers within or across broadcasts.
Despite these limitations, this resource is invaluable for pre-training models like Wav2Vec2, developing voice activity detection systems, or performing other unsupervised speech research for the Rakhine language.
## Licensing & Use
This dataset contains audio content derived from the official YouTube channel of **Radio Free Asia (RFA) Burmese**. All original content is the exclusive property of RFA and is protected by copyright.
The use of this dataset is governed by the official [RFA Terms of Use](https://www.rfa.org/about/termsofuse).
In summary, the content is made available for **non-commercial, informational, and educational purposes only**.
- **Permitted Use**: You may use this dataset for non-commercial research, personal projects, and educational applications.
- **Prohibited Use**: Any commercial use, including but not limited to training proprietary AI models for commercial products, is not permitted without explicit written permission from RFA.
- **Required Attribution**: When using or referencing this dataset, you must provide clear attribution to **Radio Free Asia (RFA)** as the original source of the content.
By using this dataset, you agree to abide by these terms.
## 📚 Citation
If you use this dataset in your work, please cite it as follows:
> **Freococo (2025).**
> *RFA Rakhine Language Voices*
> [https://huggingface.co/datasets/freococo/rfa_rakhine_language_voices](https://huggingface.co/datasets/freococo/rfa_rakhine_language_voices)
> Dataset compiled from Radio Free Asia (RFA) Burmese news broadcasts.
``` |