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arXiv · 2507.13563

Balalaika: Data-Centric, Prosody-Aware Annotation Pipeline for Russian Speech

Kirill Borodin·Nikita Vasiliev·Vasiliy Kudryavtsev·Maxim Maslov·Mikhail Gorodnichev·Grach Mkrtchian
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Abstract

We introduce Balalaika, an open-source, data-centric pipeline for processing audio and producing prosody-aware annotations. It combines semantic VAD for context-preserving segmentation, multi-ASR ensembling with ROVER consensus decoding, while retaining optional word-level timestamps, followed by automatic quality and speaker-purity filtering. The text is further enriched with punctuation restoration, lexical stress and "\textipa{e}/\textipa{\H{e}}" normalization, and IPA phonemes. Using Balalaika, we build a 5.1k-hour multi-source Russian corpus with rich annotations, and show consistent gains under equalized training budgets for both speech denoising and TTS; ablations confirm complementary benefits of stress and punctuation and improved synthesis with stricter MOS filtering. The datasets are publicly available at \href{https://huggingface.co/collections/lab260/balalaika-dataset}{\underline{\textbf{HuggingFace}}}

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Kirill Borodin, Nikita Vasiliev, Vasiliy Kudryavtsev, Maxim Maslov, Mikhail Gorodnichev, Grach Mkrtchian. 2025-07-17. Balalaika: Data-Centric, Prosody-Aware Annotation Pipeline for Russian Speech. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13563

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