This model was developed for the Google WAXAL ASR Challenge on Zindi.

waxal-w2vbert-sna-specialist is a single-language Shona CTC model, and its frontmatter language list is [sn] for that reason. It continues the waxal-w2vbert-linsnalug-raw checkpoint, itself a fine-tune of facebook/w2v-bert-2.0, and inherits that checkpoint's raw character vocabulary unchanged, capitals and the punctuation CER scores included, so the CTC head keeps its token order and stays averageable with its siblings. Training follows the same two-stage curriculum as the Lingala specialist: AfriVoice Shona first, then a refresh on WAXAL Shona gold alone. In the final system this model is the Shona branch of a language-identification-routed pair and one of the ensemble members, and it produced the Shona pseudo-labels used in a later experiment.

The WAXAL Lingala and Shona train and validation splits are recorded jointly, as 33,002 rows and about 179 hours, with no per-language breakdown, so no Shona-only row count or duration is asserted here. The speaker-disjoint holdout and the validation rows are removed before training. Stage 1 sees both sources in every batch; stage 2 sees WAXAL Shona only.

Stage 1 and stage 2 settings:

Both stages run with add_adapter: true, seed 42, and vocab_dir pointing at the parent checkpoint, so no vocabulary is rebuilt and the CTC token order is preserved. Target normalization is NFC and whitespace collapse only: no lowercasing, no punctuation stripping, because CER is computed on the raw string and WER does not strip punctuation. Hardware: 1x NVIDIA RTX 5090 (32 GB VRAM), 32 CPU cores, 92 GB RAM.

Augmentation is applied on the fly in the data collator, so each epoch sees a fresh draw of the same clip:

Why the order, and why the refresh. The curriculum was measured rather than assumed. Mixing the same data throughout scored 0.2905 on the holdout; sequencing external audio first and in-style WAXAL gold last scored 0.2785, both figures measured on the Lingala arm. The mechanism is transcription convention, not acoustics: AfriVoice transcripts carry less punctuation than WAXAL's, so a model trained on them drifts away from the reference conventions and the refresh epoch pulls it back. Where the external corpus is already punctuated the refresh buys nothing, which was also measured on a FLEURS-supplemented arm (0.2809 before the refresh, 0.2812 after).

The holdout is a speaker-disjoint carve of the WAXAL training data. It is not the competition test set, and it shares recording conditions and speakers' language variety with the training corpus, so it flatters any arm tuned on that corpus and gives no independent read on generalisation. Lower is better; the competition score is 1 - 0.5*(WER + CER).

No solo public-leaderboard score was recorded for this checkpoint on its own. Routed with its Lingala counterpart by open-set language identification, the specialist pair scored 0.744835 on the public leaderboard (CER 0.115141, WER 0.395189), above the general waxal-w2vbert-linsnalug-raw arm at 0.742142. Holdout and leaderboard did not always agree in this project, so the holdout figure above should be read as a training diagnostic, not as a ranking.

Shona is consistently easier than Lingala for this model family: 0.1616 here against 0.2785 for the Lingala specialist on the same kind of holdout. A five-way weight average that includes this checkpoint reached 0.1610 on Shona. Self-training on the WAXAL unlabeled Shona pool, using this model's own pseudo-labels (22,396 rows, top 60 per cent kept), was flat in both languages and was dropped.

Intended use is automatic speech recognition for Shona photo-description speech: spontaneous descriptions of images, on consumer recording equipment, averaging 20.2 seconds per clip. It is a specialist and should be given Shona audio only. Its behaviour on Lingala, on Luganda, or on any other language is untested and expected to be worse than that of a model trained for those languages. The competition targets Lingala, Shona and Luganda; the corrected Phase 2 test set was measured to contain only Lingala and Shona, which is why this pair of specialists covers those two.

In the final system the routing decision comes from open-set language identification rather than from the clip identifiers, which carry no language information: facebook/mms-lid-4017 called 423 of the 892 test clips Shona at confidence 0.980 and 437 Lingala at confidence 0.990, leaving 32 low-confidence clips, one of which it labelled Luganda. The 34 clips that either identification model (the other being facebook/mms-lid-256) declined to call Lingala or Shona were inspected individually: clips labelled Chichewa, Ndau or Venda are transcribed as Shona by every arm, so they are neighbouring-language confusions rather than coverage gaps.

This model is one component of the ensembles behind the submission. The 26-member character-level ROVER core scored 0.764915, and the scored final submission, recipe p2n_mbr, selects per clip across seven such ensembles and scored 0.766791 public and 0.772552 private. Solo strength is not the only criterion for membership in those core ensembles. Some members are deliberately weak alone, notably the blank-penalty re-decodes, which over-generate words and lose score in isolation (0.743 against 0.746 for the same checkpoint) while contributing +0.0104 in total, because a character vote can filter a spurious word and can never recover a missing one. The limit of that argument was also measured: genuinely weak checkpoints did not help, and a 21-member vote including them scored 0.764152 against 0.764759 for a 25-member vote of strong sources.

When transcribing a batch rather than a single clip, pass the attention mask through to the model. Clips in a batch have different lengths and the shorter ones are zero-padded; without the mask, self-attention treats that padding as real audio and the encoder output changes for every frame, not just the padded tail. Omitting it altered roughly half of all transcripts in a side-by-side check.