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.
Overcoming Data Scarcity in Multi-Dialectal Arabic ASR via Whisper Fine-Tuning
Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Nephrology（内科学部，肾病科）；Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science（伯努利数学、计算机科学研究所）；Speech Technology Lab, Campus Fryslân（语音技术实验室，弗里西恩校区）
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
In order to successfully annotate the Arabic speech con- tent found in open-domain media broadcasts, it is essential to be able to process a diverse set of Arabic dialects. For the 2017 Multi-Genre Broadcast challenge (MGB-3) there were two possible tasks: Arabic speech recognition, and Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI). In this paper, we describe our efforts to create an ADI system for the MGB-3 challenge, with the goal of distinguishing amongst four major Arabic dialects, as well as Modern Standard Arabic. Our research fo- cused on dialect variability and domain mismatches between the trai…
Over the recent decades, there has been a significant increase and development of resources for Arabic natural language processing. This includes the task of exploring Arabic Language Sentiment Analysis (ALSA) from Arabic utterances in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and different Arabic dialects. This study focuses on detecting sentiment in poems written in Misurata Arabic sub-dialect spoken in Misurata, Libya. The tools used to detect sentiment from the dataset are Sklearn as well as Mazajak sentiment tool 1. Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Naive Bayes (NB), and Support Vector Machines…
Arabic dialect identification is a specific task of natural language processing, aiming to automatically predict the Arabic dialect of a given text. Arabic dialect identification is the first step in various natural language processing applications such as machine translation, multilingual text-to-speech synthesis, and cross-language text generation. Therefore, in the last decade, interest has increased in addressing the problem of Arabic dialect identification. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of Arabic dialect identification research in written texts. We first define the prob…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；SRI International（SRI国际研究所）；LinkedIn（领英）
Statistical machine translation for dialectal Arabic is characterized by a lack of data since data acquisition involves the transcription and translation of spoken language. In this study we develop techniques for extracting parallel data for one particular dialect of Arabic (Iraqi Arabic) from out-of-domain corpora in different dialects of Arabic or in Modern Standard Arabic. We compare two different data selection strategies (cross-entropy based and submodular selection) and demonstrate that a very small but highly targeted amount of found data can improve the performance of a baseline machi…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
We present Camelira, a web-based Arabic multi-dialect morphological disambiguation tool that covers four major variants of Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Gulf, and Levantine. Camelira offers a user-friendly web interface that allows researchers and language learners to explore various linguistic information, such as part-of-speech, morphological features, and lemmas. Our system also provides an option to automatically choose an appropriate dialect-specific disambiguator based on the prediction of a dialect identification component. Camelira is publicly accessible at http://camelira.…
Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University（萨塔姆·本·阿卜杜勒阿齐兹王子大学）
The automatic classification of Arabic dialects is an ongoing research challenge, which has been explored in recent work that defines dialects based on increasingly limited geographic areas like cities and provinces. This paper focuses on a related yet relatively unexplored topic: the effects of the geographical proximity of cities located in Arab countries on their dialectical similarity. Our work is twofold, reliant on: 1) comparing the textual similarities between dialects using cosine similarity and 2) measuring the geographical distance between locations. We study MADAR and NADI, two esta…
DialectSentEval 2026: Arabic Dialect Sentiment Analysis and Swapping Shared Task
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（法赫德国王石油矿产大学）；Onaizah Colleges（欧奈扎学院）；University College of Applied Sciences（应用科学大学学院）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；UM6P（穆罕默德六世理工大学）；VinUniversity；El Technology；University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；JHU Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP)（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学语言与语音处理中心）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
We investigate different approaches for dialect identification in Arabic broadcast speech, using phonetic, lexical features obtained from a speech recognition system, and acoustic features using the i-vector framework. We studied both generative and discriminate classifiers, and we combined these features using a multi-class Support Vector Machine (SVM). We validated our results on an Arabic/English language identification task, with an accuracy of 100%. We used these features in a binary classifier to discriminate between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic, with an accuracy of …
Exploiting Dialect Identification in Automatic Dialectal Text Normalization
Computational Approaches to Modeling Language Lab（语言建模计算方法实验室）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学迪拜分校）；Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学多哈分校）
ARCADE: A City-Scale Corpus for Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Tagging
Tuwaiq Academy（图瓦伊克学院）；Robotics and Internet-of-Things Laboratory（机器人与物联网实验室）；Prince Sultan University（普森大学）；Higher School of Communication of Tunis (SUP’COM)（突尼斯通信高级学校）
Ara-HOPE: Human-Centric Post-Editing Evaluation for Dialectal Arabic to Modern Standard Arabic Translation
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院）；Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum & LIACS, Universiteit Leiden（莱顿大学莱顿医学校区及LIACS）；School of Computer Science, University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学计算机科学学院）
Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University（里昂第三大学）；Linguistics Research Center - Corpus, Discourse and Societies（语言学研究中心 - 语料库、话语与社会）；ILCEA4-CREO (Grenoble Alpes University)（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学ILCEA4-CREO）
Based on an annotated multimedia corpus, television series Mar{ā}y{ā} 2013, we dig into the question of ''automatic standardization'' of Arabic dialects for machine translation. Here we distinguish between rule-based machine translation and statistical machine translation. Machine translation from Arabic most of the time takes standard or modern Arabic as the source language and produces quite satisfactory translations thanks to the availability of the translation memories necessary for training the models. The case is different for the translation of Arabic dialects. The productions are much …
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）；University of Düsseldorf（杜塞尔多夫大学）
Diacritization process attempt to restore the short vowels in Arabic written text; which typically are omitted. This process is essential for applications such as Text-to-Speech (TTS). While diacritization of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) still holds the lion share, research on dialectal Arabic (DA) diacritization is very limited. In this paper, we present our contribution and results on the automatic diacritization of two sub-dialects of Maghrebi Arabic, namely Tunisian and Moroccan, using a character-level deep neural network architecture that stacks two bi-LSTM layers over a CRF output layer…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Carnegie Mellon University Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）
We present the second ever evaluated Arabic dialect-to-dialect machine translation effort, and the first to leverage external resources beyond a small parallel corpus. The subject has not previously received serious attention due to lack of naturally occurring parallel data; yet its importance is evidenced by dialectal Arabic's wide usage and breadth of inter-dialect variation, comparable to that of Romance languages. Our results suggest that modeling morphology and syntax significantly improves dialect-to-dialect translation, though optimizing such data-sparse models requires consideration of…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）
We present state-of-the-art results on morphosyntactic tagging across different varieties of Arabic using fine-tuned pre-trained transformer language models. Our models consistently outperform existing systems in Modern Standard Arabic and all the Arabic dialects we study, achieving 2.6% absolute improvement over the previous state-of-the-art in Modern Standard Arabic, 2.8% in Gulf, 1.6% in Egyptian, and 8.3% in Levantine. We explore different training setups for fine-tuning pre-trained transformer language models, including training data size, the use of external linguistic resources, and the…
Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University（亚历山大大学工程学院）
Arabic is one of the most important and growing languages in the world. With the rise of social media platforms such as Twitter, Arabic spoken dialects have become more in use. In this paper, we describe our approach on the NADI Shared Task 1 that requires us to build a system to differentiate between different 21 Arabic dialects, we introduce a deep learning semi-supervised fashion approach along with pre-processing that was reported on NADI shared Task 1 Corpus. Our system ranks 4th in NADI's shared task competition achieving a 23.09% F1 macro average score with a simple yet efficient approa…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；University of Düsseldorf（杜塞尔多夫大学）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
Arabic word segmentation is essential for a variety of NLP applications such as machine translation and information retrieval. Segmentation entails breaking words into their constituent stems, affixes and clitics. In this paper, we compare two approaches for segmenting four major Arabic dialects using only several thousand training examples for each dialect. The two approaches involve posing the problem as a ranking problem, where an SVM ranker picks the best segmentation, and as a sequence labeling problem, where a bi-LSTM RNN coupled with CRF determines where best to segment words. We are ab…
This paper presents our approach to address the EACL WANLP-2021 Shared Task 1: Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI). The task is aimed at developing a system that identifies the geographical location(country/province) from where an Arabic tweet in the form of modern standard Arabic or dialect comes from. We solve the task in two parts. The first part involves pre-processing the provided dataset by cleaning, adding and segmenting various parts of the text. This is followed by carrying out experiments with different versions of two Transformer based models, AraBERT and AraELECTRA. Our fi…
In this paper, we tackle the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2021) and demonstrate state-of-the-art results on all of its four subtasks. Tasks are to identify the geographic origin of short Dialectal (DA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) utterances at the levels of both country and province. Our final model is an ensemble of variants built on top of MARBERT that achieves an F1-score of 34.03% for DA at the country-level development set -- an improvement of 7.63% from previous work.
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究院人工智能部门）；Qassim University（卡西姆大学）
Can Dialects Be Steered Like Languages? Sparse Neurons and Distributed Directions in Arabic LLMs
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；Tohoku University（东北大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）
Mohamed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P)（穆罕默德六世理工大学（UM6P））
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is today a very active field of research and innovation. Many applications need however big sets of data for supervised learning, suitably labelled for the training purpose. This includes applications for the Arabic language and its national dialects. However, such open access labeled data sets in Arabic and its dialects are lacking in the Data Science ecosystem and this lack can be a burden to innovation and research in this field. In this work, we present an open data set of social data content in several Arabic dialects. This data was collected from the Twi…
In daily communications, Arabs use local dialects which are hard to identify automatically using conventional classification methods. The dialect identification challenging task becomes more complicated when dealing with an under-resourced dialects belonging to a same county/region. In this paper, we start by analyzing statistically Algerian dialects in order to capture their specificities related to prosody information which are extracted at utterance level after a coarse-grained consonant/vowel segmentation. According to these analysis findings, we propose a Hierarchical classification appro…
King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王科技城）
The signal sound contains many different features, including Voice Onset Time (VOT), which is a very important feature of stop sounds in many languages. The only application of VOT values is stopping phoneme subsets. This subset of consonant sounds is stop phonemes exist in the Arabic language, and in fact, all languages. The pronunciation of these sounds is hard and unique especially for less-educated Arabs and non-native Arabic speakers. VOT can be utilized by the human auditory system to distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stops such as /p/ and /b/ in English.This search focuses on comp…
Arabic dialect identification is a complex problem for a number of inherent properties of the language itself. In this paper, we present the experiments conducted, and the models developed by our competing team, Mawdoo3 AI, along the way to achieving our winning solution to subtask 1 of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task. The dialect identification subtask provides 21,000 country-level labeled tweets covering all 21 Arab countries. An unlabeled corpus of 10M tweets from the same domain is also presented by the competition organizers for optional use. Our winning solut…
AHaSIS: Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis for Arabic Dialects
School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, UK（计算与通信学院，兰卡斯特大学，英国）；Jazan University, Saudi Arabia（朱兹安大学，沙特阿拉伯）；Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Morocco（穆莱·易卜拉欣·聚technic大学，摩洛哥）；King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia（国王 Fahd石油和矿物大学，沙特阿拉伯）
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）
We describe findings of the third Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2022). NADI aims at advancing state of the art Arabic NLP, including on Arabic dialects. It does so by affording diverse datasets and modeling opportunities in a standardized context where meaningful comparisons between models and approaches are possible. NADI 2022 targeted both dialect identification (Subtask 1) and dialectal sentiment analysis (Subtask 2) at the country level. A total of 41 unique teams registered for the shared task, of whom 21 teams have actually participated (with 105 valid submissio…
Social media user-generated text is actually the main resource for many NLP tasks. This text however, does not follow the standard rules of writing. Moreover, the use of dialect such as Moroccan Arabic in written communications increases further NLP tasks complexity. A dialect is a verbal language that does not have a standard orthography, which leads users to improvise spelling while writing. Thus, for the same word we can find multiple forms of transliterations. Subsequently, it is mandatory to normalize these different transliterations to one canonical word form. To reach this goal, we have…
