The paper reports Alkhder’s submission to Subtask 1 of the AlexandriaX-2026 shared task, translating English dialogue turns into thirteen Arabic dialects. The team fine‑tuned NileChat‑3B‑Base with QLoRA on the Alexandria parallel dialogue corpus, training a single set of adapter weights for all dialects. Each translation is conditioned on target country, dialect, domain, participant roles, speaker‑addressee gender direction, and preceding dialogue context, and the model is run autoregressively using its own previous outputs as context. In the constrained track, training takes about one hour and inference on the private test set takes under two hours, achieving a country‑macro‑averaged spBLEU of 20.36 and chrF++ of 36.64 on both tracks.
arXiv:2609.10395v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper describes the Rosetta system for Subtask 1 (Context-Aware English-to-Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation) of the AlexandriaX shared task,...
arXiv:2609.22796v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dialectal Arabic machine translation (MT) remains challenging despite recent progress in Arabic language technologies, particularly because effective t...
MENASpeechBank is a new reference voice bank that provides about 18,000 high‑quality utterances from 124 speakers across multiple MENA countries, covering English, Modern Standard Arabic, and regional Arabic varieties. The dataset is built through a controllable pipeline that creates persona profiles inspired by the World Values Survey, defines a taxonomy of roughly 5,000 conversational scenarios, matches personas to scenarios via semantic similarity, and generates around 417,000 role‑play conversations using an LLM. Synthetic speaker‑conditioned user‑turn audio is produced from reference recordings to maintain speaker diversity, and both synthetic and human‑recorded conversations are evaluated and analyzed for quality.
NADI 2026 is the seventh edition of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification shared task series and the second focused on multidialectal Arabic speech processing. It includes five main tasks—Automatic Speech Recognition, Spoken Dialect Identification, Text-to-Speech, Spoken Language Translation, and Spoken Language Understanding—along with eight subtasks that test realistic scenarios such as low‑bandwidth, mixed dialects, code‑switching, out‑of‑domain, and zero‑shot settings. The event attracted 21 teams from at least 13 countries, with 48 test‑phase submissions and 14 system‑description papers, and the results highlight out‑of‑domain generalization as a major bottleneck while showcasing the strengths of Arabic‑specialized speech models, multimodal dialect identification, and ensemble methods.
The paper introduces a three‑layer checklist-and-judge framework to evaluate interpreter agents that mediate live conversation across languages. It assesses semantic, pragmatic, and cultural‑social dimensions—naturalness, intent, and social appropriateness—rather than just fidelity, in both single‑turn and multi‑turn settings. Extensive validation shows that conventional MT metrics miss failures in stronger interpreters, and that context, structured instructions, and cultural cues influence communicative success.
arXiv:2601. 22888v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: More than 80% of the 1.
arXiv:2606. 17255v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work describes the participation of the MLLP-VRAIN research group in the shared task of the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation track.
M3-DuplexBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate full‑duplex spoken dialogue systems (FDSDSs) that can listen while speaking. It covers multi‑turn interactions in both English and Japanese across casual conversation and question‑answering domains, jointly assessing interaction timing and response content. The benchmark also offers a reference‑conditioned setting to test sensitivity to dialogue history and trajectory mismatch.
arXiv:2605.16364v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) voice assistants are commonly built as cascaded Automatic Speech recognition (ASR) to LLM systems, where recogni...
arXiv:2608.21950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) faces unique challenges due to diglossia, extensive regional dialect variation, and limited speech resource...
The paper introduces a new benchmark of 13,044 spontaneous Nepali‑English code‑switched podcast utterances, totaling 15.45 h, and evaluates a two‑stage synthetic‑to‑real adaptation framework for ASR. Stage 1 uses supervised fine‑tuning on 0.95 h of synthetic speech, reducing Mixed Error Rate from 23.40 % to 21.52 % and switch‑point error rate from 35.89 % to 28.77 %. Stage 2 applies Group Relative Policy Optimization with script and transcription rewards, yielding modest but statistically significant further improvements, particularly in English script confusion and switch‑point accuracy. The study also shows that an auxiliary script reward term offers no benefit beyond MER‑only optimization in this setting, and that the synthetic SFT provides the main cross‑domain transfer to spontaneous human speech.
Nuha‑Speech is a new initiative aimed at creating general‑purpose Arabic speech‑large language models (speech‑LLMs). It includes the construction of a large Arabic Speech Question‑Answering corpus with over 1.5 million samples for instruction tuning, supervised fine‑tuning of Qwen‑Omni model variants at various scales, and a systematic evaluation framework with diverse tasks and tailored metrics. The project seeks to establish foundational infrastructure for Arabic speech‑LLMs amid limited Arabic speech resources.