The Esethu Framework: Reimagining Sustainable Dataset Governance and Curation for Low-Resource Languages

Jenalea Rajab, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Everlyn Chimoto, Dale Dunbar, Graham Morrissey, Fadel Thior, Luandrie Potgieter, Jessico Ojo, Atnafu Tonja, Onyothi Nekoto, Maushami Chetty, Pelonomi Moiloa, Jade Abbott, Vukosi Marivate, Benjamin Rosman
July 2025
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Abstract

This paper presents the Esethu Framework, a sustainable data curation framework specifically designed to empower local communities and ensure equitable benefit-sharing from their linguistic resources. This framework is supported by the Esethu license, a novel community-centric data license. As a proof of concept, we introduce the Vuk’uzenzele isiXhosa Speech Dataset (ViXSD), an open-source corpus developed under the Esethu Framework and License. The dataset, containing read speech from native isiXhosa speakers enriched with demographic and linguistic metadata, demonstrates how community-driven licensing and curation principles can bridge resource gaps in automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages while safeguarding the interests of data creators. We describe the framework guiding dataset development, outline the Esethu license provisions, present the methodology for ViXSD, and present ASR experiments validating ViXSD’s usability in building and refining voice-driven applications for isiXhosa.

Type
Conference paper
Publication
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Natural Language Processing Low-resource Languages
Jenalea Rajab
Jenalea Rajab

Currently completing my MSc research in Addressing Ambiguity in Human Robot Interaction using Compositional Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Task Inference

Benjamin Rosman
Benjamin Rosman
Lab Director

I am a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. I work in robotics, artificial intelligence, decision theory and machine learning.