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.
By Hasan Alkhder, Maher Pasa, Maria Hanini, Amro Najjar, Ahmet Zengin
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...
By Abdellah El Mekki, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Samar M. Magdy, Saad Ezzini, Mo El-Haj, Mustafa Jarrar, Zaid Alyafeai, Bernard Ghanem, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
GigaSpeech 3 is a new Arabic speech corpus comprising 39,000 hours and 10 million weakly transcribed segments across Algerian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Saudi, and Syrian dialects. It is built from 60 hours of manual transcription per dialect, using self‑supervised labeling models and noisy‑student refinement to produce high‑quality data. The corpus enables dialect‑specific and multi‑dialect speech recognition models that outperform existing third‑party systems, achieving a macro‑average word error rate of 23.86% for dialect‑specific models and 25.51% for a multi‑dialect model.
By Junzhe Liu, Yujie Tu, Yifan Yang, Peng Wang, Haoran Wang, Guodong Lin, Leyan Liao, Chengquan Zhang, Zhifu Gao, Xiangang Li, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Kai Yu, Xie Chen
This study evaluates large language models (LLMs) for English‑to‑dialectal Arabic machine translation using the MADAR dataset across 16 Arabic dialects, covering both translation directions. It compares specialized Arabic models (Jais, Nile), multilingual models (Gemma, Command‑R, Mistral, Aya), and commercial APIs (GPT‑4.1) with multiple metrics—BLEU, CHRF, COMET, GEMBA—and a small manual assessment. The authors also examine LLMs’ ability to classify dialects and discuss challenges in automatic MT evaluation for Arabic dialects, noting potential training data contamination.
By Josef Jon, Rawan Bondok, Ond\v{r}ej Bojar
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...
By Zien Sheikh Ali, Hamdy Mubarak, Soon-Gyo Jung, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury
arXiv:2609.23955v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Previous work on Egyptian Arabic in NLP has focused largely on the prestigious Cairene Egyptian Arabic (CEA) dialect, resulting in a lack of representa...
By Mai Mohamed Eida, Ryan Dolan, Paul de Nijs, Jonathan Dunn
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.
By Peter Sullivan, Bashar Talafha, Ahmed Ashraf, Fethi Bougares, Haroun Elleuch, Chiyu Zhang, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Youssef Mohamed, Salima Mdhaffar, Yannick Est\`eve, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Hamzah Luqman, Nizar Habash, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Previous work on Egyptian Arabic in NLP has focused largely on the prestigious Cairene Egyptian Arabic (CEA) dialect, resulting in a lack of representation for the less prestigious Sa'idi Egyptian Ara...
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.
By Jorge Iranzo-S\'anchez, Gerard Mas-Moll\`a, Adri\`a Gim\'enez, Jorge Civera, Albert Sanchis, Alfons Juan
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.
By Ryo Fukuda, Atsushi Ando, Hiroki Kanagawa, Takatomo Kano, Marc Delcroix, Naohiro Tawara, Yuya Chiba
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...
By Ahmed Ashraf, Aisha Alansari, Fadel Al Abbas, Nada Almarwani, Samah Aloufi, Saad Ezzini, Maged S. Al-Shaibani, Doaa Dalaq, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Mohamed Mehdi Trigui, Dania Refai, Layan Refai, Mohamed Akrout, Mustafa Jarrar, Wasfi G. Al-Khatib, Alaa Dalaq, Darin El-Nakla, Samir Abdaljalil, Abdulrahman Al-Fakih, Nour El Imane Zeghib, Moussa Redah, Salmane Chafik, Mohamed El-Attar, Rima Grati, Sarah Kohail, Malak Alkhorasani, Khadijah Al Safwan, Ismail M. Mudhaffar, Ali Altam, Ahmed Al-Shaikh, Adnan Saeed, Hamzah Luqman
arXiv:2601. 12494v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Audio large language models (LLMs) enable unified speech understanding and generation, but adapting them to linguistically complex and dialect-rich settings such as Arabic-English remains challenging.
By Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury