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.
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.
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. 13580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jais 2 is a family of Arabic-centric large language models developed jointly by MBZUAI, Cerebras, and Inception, designed to advance Arabic-centric language modeling, with strong performance across the Arabic and culturally grounded benchmarks evaluated in this report.
EDRAC is the first large‑scale benchmark for dialectal Arabic machine reading comprehension and generative question answering, covering five major dialects—Egyptian, Moroccan, Emirati, Syrian, and Saudi. It contains 499 passages from naturally spoken interactions and 4,977 QA pairs produced via a human–LLM collaborative pipeline. The benchmark evaluates Arabic‑centric and multilingual large language models, revealing gaps between semantic answer quality and dialectal fidelity and underscoring limitations of current evaluation metrics for dialectal Arabic generation.
arXiv:2601.06086v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Extending large language models (LLMs) to the speech domain has recently gained significant attention. A typical approach connects a pretrained LLM...
arXiv:2609.24410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-to-text engines are extremely needed nowadays for different applications, representing an essential enabler in human-robot interaction. Still, s...
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.
AQL‑Lite is a framework that enables efficient adaptation of multilingual large language models to Modern Standard Arabic by combining a quality‑first data curation pipeline with a partial‑parameter continual pretraining recipe. The approach trains RS‑LoRA adapters, the last eight transformer blocks, and the embedding matrix using layer‑wise learning rates, achieving significant benchmark gains while reducing training time and resource usage. In large‑scale experiments, AQL‑Lite recovers most of the performance of full‑parameter continual pretraining and outperforms adapter‑only baselines, demonstrating its practicality for Arabic LLM development.
arXiv:2610.19388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Massively multilingual speech modeling has made remarkable progress in recent years, yet existing training resources and benchmarks still underrepresen...
arXiv:2610.09756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Classical Arabic poetry generation requires simultaneously satisfying semantic, linguistic, and fine-grained prosodic constraints. Existing systems typ...
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.
arXiv:2606. 03957v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational ASR for lower-resource languages and niche domains is limited by the scarcity of domain-matched multi-speaker training data.