African hospitals have some of the lowest doctor-patient ratios in the world. At very busy clinics, doctors could see over 30 patients a day without any of the productivity-boosting tools available to their colleagues in developed countries.
Clinical speech-to-text is ubiquitous in the developed world but virtually absent across African hospitals. This project seeks to create pan-African English ASR models for healthcare, expanding clinical speech recognition access to African clinics to help alleviate the burden of daily clinical documentation.
The objective of this challenge is to create an automatic speech recognition model for clinical speech-to-text, using an accented English speech corpus of 200 hours, featuring 120 different African accents.
This is the largest and most diverse open-source accented speech dataset for clinical and general domain ASR in Africa, covering 13 countries, 2463 unique speakers, 52% female; featuring 67,577 audio clips, and 200 hours of audio.
Intron's core technology is speech recognition for African accents. On our journey to improve African healthcare, we're proud to have also created Africa's largest and most diverse speech dataset supporting speech-to-text transcription in 300+ African accents– over 1M clips contributed by over 7000 Africans across 13 countries. In healthcare, our technology eliminates barriers to adopting healthcare digitization at busy hospitals where manual data entry with keyboards has been a huge obstacle. Clinicians have perfected the use of the pen for decades, so the inevitable digital transition [via the keyboard] has been more painful than necessary. In the Judiciary, our technology helps Judges and Justices reduce the manual documentation burden during court hearings, preserving testimony integrity in an overburdened criminal justice system. Learn more about intron at https://www.intron.io.
About Hugging Face (huggingface.co)
Hugging Face, Inc. is an American company that develops tools for building applications using machine learning. It is most notable for its Transformers library built for natural language processing applications and its platform that allows users to share machine learning models and datasets.
About Data Science Network (datasciencenigeria.org)
DSN's vision is to train, mentor and inspire 100,000 Nigerian undergraduates and graduates to build new skills in Advanced Analytics/Data Science and create 1 million jobs/opportunities in data science/advanced analytics and to build a local data science/big data/AI ecosystem that will position Nigeria to become the outsourcing hub for international Data Science/Advanced Analytics/Big Data projects with opportunity to access 2-3% share of the estimated global Artificial intelligence GDP contribution of up to $15.7 trillion by 2030.
About Lanfrica (lanfrica.com)
Lanfrica aims to accelerate the development of AI applications in African and under-represented regions, by creating large, high-quality African machine learning datasets and building a data-centric foundational platform to assist enterprises in accelerating their AI applications.
About Masakhane (www.masakhane.io)
Masakhane is a grassroots organisation whose mission is to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans. Despite the fact that 2000 of the world’s languages are African, African languages are barely represented in technology. The tragic past of colonialism has been devastating for African languages in terms of their support, preservation and integration. This has resulted in technological space that does not understand our names, our cultures, our places, our history. Masakhane roughly translates to “We build together” in isiZulu. Our goal is for Africans to shape and own these technological advances towards human dignity, well-being and equity, through inclusive community building, open participatory research and multidisciplinarity.
The evaluation metric for this challenge is Word Error Rate Metric.
You can read more about WER in this medium article. Here are some libraries to start off with.
For every row in the dataset, submission files should contain 2 columns: ID and transcription.
Your submission file should look like this:
ID Text
fffd64b4-c5a2-438a-8004-a9555426ee40 I would need to support the government...
fffbca60-4c3e-430c-a91a-9ae54408cc6a I count...
$2 500 USD
$1 500 USD
$1 000 USD
Competition closes on 28 May 2023.
The test set will be uploaded on 19 May 2023.
Final submissions must be received by 11:59 PM GMT.
We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.
Teams and collaboration
You may participate in competitions as an individual or in a team of up to four people. When creating a team, the team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowable submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed the maximum number of submissions for the competition, minus the total number of submissions among team members at team formation. Prizes are transferred only to the individual players or to the team leader.
Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be immediately disqualified from the platform.
Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).
The Zindi data scientist who sets up a team is the default Team Leader but they can transfer leadership to another data scientist on the team. The Team Leader can invite other data scientists to their team. Invited data scientists can accept or reject invitations. Until a second data scientist accepts an invitation to join a team, the data scientist who initiated a team remains an individual on the leaderboard. No additional members may be added to teams within the final 5 days of the competition or last hour of a hackathon.
The team leader can initiate a merge with another team. Only the team leader of the second team can accept the invite. The default team leader is the leader from the team who initiated the invite. Teams can only merge if the total number of members is less than or equal to the maximum team size of the competition.
A team can be disbanded if it has not yet made a submission. Once a submission is made individual members cannot leave the team.
All members in the team receive points associated with their ranking in the competition and there is no split or division of the points between team members.
Datasets and packages
The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only. Your models should not use any of the metadata provided.
You may use only the datasets provided for this competition. Automated machine learning tools such as automl are not permitted.
You may use pretrained models as long as they are openly available to everyone.
The data used in this competition is the sole property of Zindi and the competition host. You may not transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute or otherwise provide or make available any competition data to any party not participating in the Competition (this includes uploading the data to any public site such as Kaggle or GitHub). You may upload, store and work with the data on any cloud platform such as Google Colab, AWS or similar, as long as 1) the data remains private and 2) doing so does not contravene Zindi’s rules of use.
You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the competition data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.
Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.
Submissions and winning
You may make a maximum of 10 submissions per day.
You may make a maximum of 300 submissions for this competition.
Before the end of the competition you need to choose 2 submissions to be judged on for the private leaderboard. If you do not make a selection your 2 best public leaderboard submissions will be used to score on the private leaderboard.
During the competition, your best public score will be displayed regardless of the submissions you have selected. When the competition closes your best private score out of the 2 selected submissions will be displayed.
Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard is the dev files. While the competition is open, the Public Leaderboard will rank the submitted solutions by the accuracy score they achieve. Upon close of the competition, the Private Leaderboard, which the test dataset, will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the competition. The test audio files will be provided on 19 May 2023.
Note that to count, your submission must first pass processing. If your submission fails during the processing step, it will not be counted and not receive a score; nor will it count against your daily submission limit. If you encounter problems with your submission file, your best course of action is to ask for advice on the Competition’s discussion forum.
If you are in the top 10 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 48 hours to respond and submit your code following the submission guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.
If your solution places 1st, 2nd, or 3rd on the final leaderboard, you will be required to submit your winning solution code to us for verification, and you thereby agree to assign all worldwide rights of copyright in and to such winning solution to Zindi.
If two solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the submission was made (the earlier solution will win).
If the error metric requires probabilities to be submitted, do not set thresholds (or round your probabilities) to improve your place on the leaderboard. In order to ensure that the client receives the best solution Zindi will need the raw probabilities. This will allow the clients to set thresholds to their own needs.
The winners will be paid via bank transfer, PayPal, or other international money transfer platform. International transfer fees will be deducted from the total prize amount, unless the prize money is under $500, in which case the international transfer fees will be covered by Zindi. In all cases, the winners are responsible for any other fees applied by their own bank or other institution for receiving the prize money. All taxes imposed on prizes are the sole responsibility of the winners. The top 3 winners or team leaders will be required to present Zindi with proof of identification, proof of residence and a letter from your bank confirming your banking details.Winners will be paid in USD or the currency of the competition. If your account cannot receive US Dollars or the currency of the competition then your bank will need to provide proof of this and Zindi will try to accommodate this.
Payment will be made after code review and an introductory call with the host.
You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this competition constitutes your acceptance of these official competition rules.
Zindi is committed to providing solutions of value to our clients and partners. To this end, we reserve the right to disqualify your submission on the grounds of usability or value. This includes but is not limited to the use of data leaks or any other practices that we deem to compromise the inherent value of your solution.
Zindi also reserves the right to disqualify you and/or your submissions from any competition if we believe that you violated the rules or violated the spirit of the competition or the platform in any other way. The disqualifications are irrespective of your position on the leaderboard and completely at the discretion of Zindi.
Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this competition. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.
Reproducibility of submitted code
Data standards:
Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:
Monitoring of submissions