Arabic dialect identification (ADI) systems are essential for large-scale data collection pipelines that enable the development of inclusive speech technologies for Arabic language varieties. However, the reliability of current ADI systems is limited by poor generalization to out-of-domain speech. In this paper, we present an effective approach based on voice conversion for training ADI models that achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly improves robustness in cross-domain scenarios. Evaluated on a newly collected real-world test set spanning four different domains, our approach yields consistent improvements of up to +34.1% in accuracy across domains. Furthermore, we present an analysis of our approach and demonstrate that voice conversion helps mitigate the speaker bias in the ADI dataset. We release our robust ADI model and cross-domain evaluation dataset to support the development of inclusive speech technologies for Arabic.
This paper presents a novel approach to fine-tuning the Qwen2-1.5B model for Arabic language processing using Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) on a system with only 4GB VRAM. We detail the process of adapting this large language model to the Arabic domain, using diverse datasets including Bactrian, OpenAssistant, and Wikipedia Arabic corpora. Our methodology involves custom data preprocessing, model configuration, and training optimization techniques such as gradient accumulation and mixed-precision training. We address specific challenges in Arabic NLP, including morphological complexity, dialectal variations, and diacritical mark handling. Experimental results over 10,000 training steps show significant performance improvements, with the final loss converging to 0.1083. We provide comprehensive analysis of GPU memory usage, training dynamics, and model evaluation across various Arabic language tasks, including text classification, question answering, and dialect identification. The fine-tuned model demonstrates robustness to input perturbations and improved handling of Arabic-specific linguistic phenomena. This research contributes to multilingual AI by demonstrating a resource-efficient approach for creating specialized language models, potentially democratizing access to advanced NLP technologies for diverse linguistic communities. Our work paves the way for future research in low-resource language adaptation and efficient fine-tuning of large language models.
In this paper we present our submission for the NorSID Shared Task as part of the 2025 VarDial Workshop (Scherrer et al., 2025), consisting of three tasks: Intent Detection, Slot Filling and Dialect Identification, evaluated using data in different dialects of the Norwegian language. For Intent Detection and Slot Filling, we have fine-tuned a multitask model in a cross-lingual setting, to leverage the xSID dataset available in 17 languages. In the case of Dialect Identification, our final submission consists of a model fine-tuned on the provided development set, which has obtained the highest scores within our experiments. Our final results on the test set show that our models do not drop in performance compared to the development set, likely due to the domain-specificity of the dataset and the similar distribution of both subsets. Finally, we also report an in-depth analysis of the provided datasets and their artifacts, as well as other sets of experiments that have been carried out but did not yield the best results. Additionally, we present an analysis on the reasons why some methods have been more successful than others; mainly the impact of the combination of languages and domain-specificity of the training data on the results.
Vietnamese, a low-resource language, is typically categorized into three primary dialect groups that belong to Northern, Central, and Southern Vietnam. However, each province within these regions exhibits its own distinct pronunciation variations. Despite the existence of various speech recognition datasets, none of them has provided a fine-grained classification of the 63 dialects specific to individual provinces of Vietnam. To address this gap, we introduce Vietnamese Multi-Dialect (ViMD) dataset, a novel comprehensive dataset capturing the rich diversity of 63 provincial dialects spoken across Vietnam. Our dataset comprises 102.56 hours of audio, consisting of approximately 19,000 utterances, and the associated transcripts contain over 1.2 million words. To provide benchmarks and simultaneously demonstrate the challenges of our dataset, we fine-tune state-of-the-art pre-trained models for two downstream tasks: (1) Dialect identification and (2) Speech recognition. The empirical results suggest two implications including the influence of geographical factors on dialects, and the constraints of current approaches in speech recognition tasks involving multi-dialect speech data. Our dataset is available for research purposes.
Arabic, with its rich diversity of dialects, remains significantly underrepresented in Large Language Models, particularly in dialectal variations. We address this gap by introducing seven synthetic datasets in dialects alongside Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), created using Machine Translation (MT) combined with human post-editing. We present AraDiCE, a benchmark for Arabic Dialect and Cultural Evaluation. We evaluate LLMs on dialect comprehension and generation, focusing specifically on low-resource Arabic dialects. Additionally, we introduce the first-ever fine-grained benchmark designed to evaluate cultural awareness across the Gulf, Egypt, and Levant regions, providing a novel dimension to LLM evaluation. Our findings demonstrate that while Arabic-specific models like Jais and AceGPT outperform multilingual models on dialectal tasks, significant challenges persist in dialect identification, generation, and translation. This work contributes $\approx$45K post-edited samples, a cultural benchmark, and highlights the importance of tailored training to improve LLM performance in capturing the nuances of diverse Arabic dialects and cultural contexts. We have released the dialectal translation models and benchmarks developed in this study (https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/AraDiCE).
The evolution and diversity of a language is evident from it's various dialects. If the various dialects are not addressed in technological advancements like automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis, there is a chance that these dialects may disappear. Speech technology plays a role in preserving various dialects of a language from going extinct. In order to build a full fledged automatic speech recognition system that addresses various dialects, an Automatic Dialect Identification (ADI) system acting as the front end is required. This is similar to how language identification systems act as front ends to automatic speech recognition systems that handle multiple languages. The current work proposes a way to identify two popular and broadly classified Tamil dialects, namely literary and colloquial Tamil. Acoustical characteristics rather than phonetics and phonotactics are used, alleviating the requirement of language-dependant linguistic tools. Hence one major advantage of the proposed method is that it does not require an annotated corpus, hence it can be easily adapted to other languages. Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) features are used to perform the classification task. The experiments yielded an error rate of 12%. Vowel nasalization, as being the reason for this good performance, is discussed. The number of mixture models for the GMM is varied and the performance is analysed.
Culture and language evolve together. The old literary form of Tamil is used commonly for writing and the contemporary colloquial Tamil is used for speaking. Human-computer interaction applications require Colloquial Tamil (CT) to make it more accessible and easy for the everyday user and, it requires Literary Tamil (LT) when information is needed in a formal written format. Continuing the use of LT alongside CT in computer aided language learning applications will both preserve LT, and provide ease of use via CT, at the same time. Hence there is a need for the conversion between LT and CT dialects, which demands as a first step, dialect identification. Dialect Identification (DID) of LT and CT is an unexplored area of research. In the current work, keeping the nuances of both these dialects in mind, five methods are explored which include two implicit methods - Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN); two explicit methods - Parallel Phone Recognition (PPR) and Parallel Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (P-LVCSR); two versions of the proposed explicit Unified Phone Recognition method (UPR-1 and UPR-2). These methods vary based on: the need for annotated data, the size of the unit, the way in which modelling is carried out, and the way in which the final decision is made. Even though the average duration of the test utterances is less - 4.9s for LT and 2.5s for CT - the systems performed well, offering the following identification accuracies: 87.72% (GMM), 93.97% (CNN), 89.24% (PPR), 94.21% (P-LVCSR), 88.57% (UPR-1), 93.53% (UPR-1 with P-LVCSR), 94.55% (UPR-2), and 95.61% (UPR-2 with P-LVCSR).
This paper presents the contribution of our dzNLP team to the NADI 2024 shared task, specifically in Subtask 1 - Multi-label Country-level Dialect Identification (MLDID) (Closed Track). We explored various configurations to address the challenge: in Experiment 1, we utilized a union of n-gram analyzers (word, character, character with word boundaries) with different n-gram values; in Experiment 2, we combined a weighted union of Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) features with various weights; and in Experiment 3, we implemented a weighted major voting scheme using three classifiers: Linear Support Vector Classifier (LSVC), Random Forest (RF), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). Our approach, despite its simplicity and reliance on traditional machine learning techniques, demonstrated competitive performance in terms of F1-score and precision. Notably, we achieved the highest precision score of 63.22% among the participating teams. However, our overall F1 score was approximately 21%, significantly impacted by a low recall rate of 12.87%. This indicates that while our models were highly precise, they struggled to recall a broad range of dialect labels, highlighting a critical area for improvement in handling diverse dialectal variations.
We describe the findings of the fifth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2024). NADI's objective is to help advance SoTA Arabic NLP by providing guidance, datasets, modeling opportunities, and standardized evaluation conditions that allow researchers to collaboratively compete on pre-specified tasks. NADI 2024 targeted both dialect identification cast as a multi-label task (Subtask~1), identification of the Arabic level of dialectness (Subtask~2), and dialect-to-MSA machine translation (Subtask~3). A total of 51 unique teams registered for the shared task, of whom 12 teams have participated (with 76 valid submissions during the test phase). Among these, three teams participated in Subtask~1, three in Subtask~2, and eight in Subtask~3. The winning teams achieved 50.57 F\textsubscript{1} on Subtask~1, 0.1403 RMSE for Subtask~2, and 20.44 BLEU in Subtask~3, respectively. Results show that Arabic dialect processing tasks such as dialect identification and machine translation remain challenging. We describe the methods employed by the participating teams and briefly offer an outlook for NADI.
Dialectal Arabic is the primary spoken language used by native Arabic speakers in daily communication. The rise of social media platforms has notably expanded its use as a written language. However, Arabic dialects do not have standard orthographies. This, combined with the inherent noise in user-generated content on social media, presents a major challenge to NLP applications dealing with Dialectal Arabic. In this paper, we explore and report on the task of CODAfication, which aims to normalize Dialectal Arabic into the Conventional Orthography for Dialectal Arabic (CODA). We work with a unique parallel corpus of multiple Arabic dialects focusing on five major city dialects. We benchmark newly developed pretrained sequence-to-sequence models on the task of CODAfication. We further show that using dialect identification information improves the performance across all dialects. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.
The diverse nature of dialects presents challenges for models trained on specific linguistic patterns, rendering them susceptible to errors when confronted with unseen or out-of-distribution (OOD) data. This study introduces a novel margin-enhanced joint energy model (MEJEM) tailored specifically for OOD detection in dialects. By integrating a generative model and the energy margin loss, our approach aims to enhance the robustness of dialect identification systems. Furthermore, we explore two OOD scores for OOD dialect detection, and our findings conclusively demonstrate that the energy score outperforms the softmax score. Leveraging Sharpness-Aware Minimization to optimize the training process of the joint model, we enhance model generalization by minimizing both loss and sharpness. Experiments conducted on dialect identification tasks validate the efficacy of Energy-Based Models and provide valuable insights into their performance.
Zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) systems have advanced for English, however, it still lags behind due to insufficient resources. We address this gap for Arabic, a language of more than 450 million native speakers, by first adapting a sizeable existing dataset to suit the needs of speech synthesis. Additionally, we employ a set of Arabic dialect identification models to explore the impact of pre-defined dialect labels on improving the ZS-TTS model in a multi-dialect setting. Subsequently, we fine-tune the XTTS\footnote{https://docs.coqui.ai/en/latest/models/xtts.html}\footnote{https://medium.com/machine-learns/xtts-v2-new-version-of-the-open-source-text-to-speech-model-af73914db81f}\footnote{https://medium.com/@erogol/xtts-v1-techincal-notes-eb83ff05bdc} model, an open-source architecture. We then evaluate our models on a dataset comprising 31 unseen speakers and an in-house dialectal dataset. Our automated and human evaluation results show convincing performance while capable of generating dialectal speech. Our study highlights significant potential for improvements in this emerging area of research in Arabic.
This paper explores the use of Hybrid CTC/Attention encoder-decoder models trained with Intermediate CTC (InterCTC) for Irish (Gaelic) low-resource speech recognition (ASR) and dialect identification (DID). Results are compared to the current best performing models trained for ASR (TDNN-HMM) and DID (ECAPA-TDNN). An optimal InterCTC setting is initially established using a Conformer encoder. This setting is then used to train a model with an E-branchformer encoder and the performance of both architectures are compared. A multi-task fine-tuning approach is adopted for language model (LM) shallow fusion. The experiments yielded an improvement in DID accuracy of 10.8% relative to a baseline ECAPA-TDNN, and WER performance approaching the TDNN-HMM model. This multi-task approach emerges as a promising strategy for Irish low-resource ASR and DID.
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task to extract key information from texts, but annotated resources are scarce for dialects. This paper introduces the first dialectal NER dataset for German, BarNER, with 161K tokens annotated on Bavarian Wikipedia articles (bar-wiki) and tweets (bar-tweet), using a schema adapted from German CoNLL 2006 and GermEval. The Bavarian dialect differs from standard German in lexical distribution, syntactic construction, and entity information. We conduct in-domain, cross-domain, sequential, and joint experiments on two Bavarian and three German corpora and present the first comprehensive NER results on Bavarian. Incorporating knowledge from the larger German NER (sub-)datasets notably improves on bar-wiki and moderately on bar-tweet. Inversely, training first on Bavarian contributes slightly to the seminal German CoNLL 2006 corpus. Moreover, with gold dialect labels on Bavarian tweets, we assess multi-task learning between five NER and two Bavarian-German dialect identification tasks and achieve NER SOTA on bar-wiki. We substantiate the necessity of our low-resource BarNER corpus and the importance of diversity in dialects, genres, and topics in enhancing model performance.
In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of several key factors influencing the performance of Arabic Dialect Identification NADI'2023, with a specific focus on the first subtask involving country-level dialect identification. Our investigation encompasses the effects of surface preprocessing, morphological preprocessing, FastText vector model, and the weighted concatenation of TF-IDF features. For classification purposes, we employ the Linear Support Vector Classification (LSVC) model. During the evaluation phase, our system demonstrates noteworthy results, achieving an F1 score of 62.51%. This achievement closely aligns with the average F1 scores attained by other systems submitted for the first subtask, which stands at 72.91%.
Pre-trained Transformer-based speech models have shown striking performance when fine-tuned on various downstream tasks such as automatic speech recognition and spoken language identification (SLID). However, the problem of domain mismatch remains a challenge in this area, where the domain of the pre-training data might differ from that of the downstream labeled data used for fine-tuning. In multilingual tasks such as SLID, the pre-trained speech model may not support all the languages in the downstream task. To address this challenge, we propose self-supervised adaptive pre-training (SAPT) to adapt the pre-trained model to the target domain and languages of the downstream task. We apply SAPT to the XLSR-128 model and investigate the effectiveness of this approach for the SLID task. First, we demonstrate that SAPT improves XLSR performance on the FLEURS benchmark with substantial gains up to 40.1% for under-represented languages. Second, we apply SAPT on four different datasets in a few-shot learning setting, showing that our approach improves the sample efficiency of XLSR during fine-tuning. Our experiments provide strong empirical evidence that continual adaptation via self-supervision improves downstream performance for multilingual speech models.
In this paper, we present our approach for the "Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) Shared Task 2023". We highlight our methodology for subtask 1 which deals with country-level dialect identification. Recognizing dialects plays an instrumental role in enhancing the performance of various downstream NLP tasks such as speech recognition and translation. The task uses the Twitter dataset (TWT-2023) that encompasses 18 dialects for the multi-class classification problem. Numerous transformer-based models, pre-trained on Arabic language, are employed for identifying country-level dialects. We fine-tune these state-of-the-art models on the provided dataset. The ensembling method is leveraged to yield improved performance of the system. We achieved an F1-score of 76.65 (11th rank on the leaderboard) on the test dataset.
Several recent papers have published good solutions for language identification (LID) for about 300 high-resource and medium-resource languages. However, there is no LID available that (i) covers a wide range of low-resource languages, (ii) is rigorously evaluated and reliable and (iii) efficient and easy to use. Here, we publish GlotLID-M, an LID model that satisfies the desiderata of wide coverage, reliability and efficiency. It identifies 1665 languages, a large increase in coverage compared to prior work. In our experiments, GlotLID-M outperforms four baselines (CLD3, FT176, OpenLID and NLLB) when balancing F1 and false positive rate (FPR). We analyze the unique challenges that low-resource LID poses: incorrect corpus metadata, leakage from high-resource languages, difficulty separating closely related languages, handling of macrolanguage vs varieties and in general noisy data. We hope that integrating GlotLID-M into dataset creation pipelines will improve quality and enhance accessibility of NLP technology for low-resource languages and cultures. GlotLID-M model (including future versions), code, and list of data sources are available: https://github.com/cisnlp/GlotLID.
We describe the findings of the fourth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2023). The objective of NADI is to help advance state-of-the-art Arabic NLP by creating opportunities for teams of researchers to collaboratively compete under standardized conditions. It does so with a focus on Arabic dialects, offering novel datasets and defining subtasks that allow for meaningful comparisons between different approaches. NADI 2023 targeted both dialect identification (Subtask 1) and dialect-to-MSA machine translation (Subtask 2 and Subtask 3). A total of 58 unique teams registered for the shared task, of whom 18 teams have participated (with 76 valid submissions during test phase). Among these, 16 teams participated in Subtask 1, 5 participated in Subtask 2, and 3 participated in Subtask 3. The winning teams achieved 87.27 F1 on Subtask 1, 14.76 Bleu in Subtask 2, and 21.10 Bleu in Subtask 3, respectively. Results show that all three subtasks remain challenging, thereby motivating future work in this area. We describe the methods employed by the participating teams and briefly offer an outlook for NADI.
We present ArTST, a pre-trained Arabic text and speech transformer for supporting open-source speech technologies for the Arabic language. The model architecture follows the unified-modal framework, SpeechT5, that was recently released for English, and is focused on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), with plans to extend the model for dialectal and code-switched Arabic in future editions. We pre-trained the model from scratch on MSA speech and text data, and fine-tuned it for the following tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech synthesis (TTS), and spoken dialect identification. In our experiments comparing ArTST with SpeechT5, as well as with previously reported results in these tasks, ArTST performs on a par with or exceeding the current state-of-the-art in all three tasks. Moreover, we find that our pre-training is conducive for generalization, which is particularly evident in the low-resource TTS task. The pre-trained model as well as the fine-tuned ASR and TTS models are released for research use.