Training data
The model was adapted on the training partition of the Moldovan Dialectal
Romanian Educational Speech Corpus. The complete corpus contains 35,760
validated audio-text segments (70.67 hours), derived from 418 educational
lesson videos and 56 inferred speakers. The split was produced at segment
level with seed 42 using an 80/10/10 protocol.
Hugging Face dataset:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/FraPiz/moldovan-dialectal-romanian-speech-corpus
Original Google Drive release:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Va0tmpp-Q8A2gGbFwLignYVtf0KD6Uth
Evaluation
Evaluation used the complete held-out test partition of 3,576 segments
(approximately 6.99 hours). References and hypotheses were normalized to
Unicode NFC, stripped, and lowercased; punctuation was retained. Decoding used
Romanian language conditioning and the transcription task.
Table with columns: Model, WER (95% CI), CER (95% CI), RTF| Model | WER (95% CI) | CER (95% CI) | RTF |
|---|
| Base model, zero-shot | 18.85% (17.71-19.99) | 7.20% (6.60-7.81) | 0.020 |
| This fine-tuned model | 3.18% (2.83-3.56) | 0.98% (0.80-1.20) | 0.021 |
Confidence intervals use 10,000 paired bootstrap replicates clustered by
source video. The test partition contains unseen segments, but not unseen
speakers or source videos. These results therefore measure matched-domain
segment generalization and must not be interpreted as speaker-independent
performance.
Usage
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForSpeechSeq2Seq, AutoProcessor, pipeline
model_id = "FraPiz/whisper-large-v3-turbo-moldovan-romanian"
device = 0 if torch.cuda.is_available() else -1
dtype = torch.float16 if torch.cuda.is_available() else torch.float32
model = AutoModelForSpeechSeq2Seq.from_pretrained(
model_id,
torch_dtype=dtype,
low_cpu_mem_usage=True,
)
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id)
asr = pipeline(
"automatic-speech-recognition",
model=model,
tokenizer=processor.tokenizer,
feature_extractor=processor.feature_extractor,
torch_dtype=dtype,
device=device,
)
result = asr(
"audio.wav",
generate_kwargs={"language": "ro", "task": "transcribe"},
)
print(result["text"])
Limitations
- The training material is dominated by planned educational speech.
- Evaluation does not establish performance on unseen speakers, independent
source videos, spontaneous conversation, or other recording domains.
- Accuracy may decrease for code-switching, heavy noise, distant microphones,
and dialectal varieties not represented in the corpus.
- Speaker gender metadata in the corpus was inferred from names and is only
approximate descriptive metadata.
Authors and project
Marius Cerescu, Alexandr Parahonco, Olesea Caftanatov, Tudor Bumbu, Nichita
Degteariov, and Ion Bostan. Vladimir Andrunachievici Institute of Mathematics
and Computer Science, Moldova State University, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova.
This work was elaborated within the project Platforma Educationala bazata pe
Inteligenta Artificiala "Guguta", registered in the State Register of projects
in science and innovation, code 25.80012.0807.21TC, project leader Tudor Bumbu,
Dr.
Citation
@inproceedings{cerescu2026moldovan,
title = {Fine-Tuning Neural Speech Models for Romanian Speech Recognition and Synthesis with Moldovan Dialectal Data},
author = {Cerescu, Marius and Parahonco, Alexandr and Caftanatov, Olesea and Bumbu, Tudor and Degteariov, Nichita and Bostan, Ion},
booktitle = {International Conference on System Analysis and Intelligent Information Technologies (SAIIT)},
year = {2026}
}
License
The model is released under the Apache License 2.0, consistently with the base
Whisper model. Users remain responsible for compliance with applicable laws and
with the terms governing any audio processed with the model.