$ cd /home/diarray
And What's beyond the Infinity?
Hi, I’m Yacouba Diarra (diarray on the internet) and I care about stuffs like having a blog to post about, well… stuffs. By the way this website was created with markdown, what a great framework to create a motherfucking website!
Right now? I’m doing research on speech recognition at RobotsMali AI4D Lab. If you want to know more about me check my ChatGPT biography @ whoami, I’ll try to update it maybe once every leap year. Here are some of the stuffs I have worked on and places you can find them (I’ll update this more often):
Projects
- Datasets & Models: Released African Next Voices (612h) and Kunkado (160h) open Bambara ASR datasets and associated models
- An be Kalan: Initiated the RobotsMali literacy apps development (GitHub / Store) + edge deployment of our ASR models to enable offline usage in Mali.
- Fintech: Lately, my focus shifted to exploring and adapting foundational ML techniques to drive financial inclusion in the absence of an established credit system.
- Space: I'm currently exploring Machine Learning in Observational Astronomical and space discovery.
- Robotics: ROS and Computer Vision; bronze medalist at the 2023 Panafrican Robotics Competition.
- Credit Scoring: I developed fundamental skills during my undergrad project, using DFS to create features from a large relational database and compare ML algorithms for credit scoring.
- Learning: At some point I was obsessed about implementing DL techniques from scratch; keep in mind this was started in the pre-ChatGPT era so it was all struggle and learnings. Special mention to Michael Nielsen for his book.
Publications
For a full list of my publications, check my Semantic Scholar or Google Scholar profiles.
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Listen, Attend, Understand: a Regularization Technique for Stable E2E Speech Translation Training on High Variance labels (2026). Yacouba Diarra and Michael Leventhal. arXiv
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Kunnafonidilaw ka Cadeau (Kunkado): an ASR dataset of present-day Bambara (2025). Yacouba Diarra, P. A. Kamaté, N. S. Coulibaly, and M. Leventhal. AfricaNLP @ EACL 2026 | arXiv | HuggingFace
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Dealing with the Hard Facts of Low-Resource African NLP (2025). Yacouba Diarra et al. AfricaNLP @ EACL 2026 | arXiv | HuggingFace
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Where Are We At with Automatic Speech Recognition for the Bambara Language? (2026). Yacouba Diarra et al. AfricaNLP @ EACL 2026 | arXiv
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Cost Analysis of Human-corrected Transcription for Predominately Oral Languages (2025). Yacouba Diarra, N. S. Coulibaly, and M. Leventhal. arXiv