NADI 2026: The Second Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing Shared Task

Peter Sullivan, Bashar Talafha, Ahmed Ashraf, Fethi Bougares, Haroun Elleuch, Chiyu Zhang, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Youssef Mohamed, Salima Mdhaffar, Yannick Estève, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Hamzah Luqman, Nizar Habash, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed


Abstract
NADI 2026 is the seventh edition of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task series and the second dedicated to multidialectal Arabic speech processing. This edition comprises five tasks and eight subtasks spanning Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Dialect Identification (SDID), Text-to-Speech (TTS), Spoken Language Translation (SLT), and Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). NADI 2026 emphasizes realistic evaluation through low-bandwidth, mixed-dialect, code-switched, out-of-domain, and zero-shot settings, while introducing TTS, SLT, and SLU to the series for the first time. The shared task attracted 21 participating teams from at least 13 countries, with 48 test-phase submissions, and 14 submitted system-description papers. Results show that out-of-domain generalization remain a bottleneck and highlight the effectiveness of recent Arabic-specialized speech models, multimodal dialect identification, and ensemble methods. Overall, NADI 2026 provides a broader and more challenging benchmark for robust Arabic dialect speech processing.
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.1
Volume:
Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Tamer Elsayed, Houda Bouamor, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Hend Al-Khalifa, Ahmed Abdelali, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Abdellah El Mekki, Kareem Darwish, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Hamzah Luqman, Salam Khalifa, Samar Magdy, Zaid Alyafeai, Injy Hamed, Wajdi Zaghouani, Imed Zitouni
Venue:
ArabicNLP
SIG:
SIGARAB
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–30
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.1/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peter Sullivan, Bashar Talafha, Ahmed Ashraf, Fethi Bougares, Haroun Elleuch, Chiyu Zhang, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Youssef Mohamed, Salima Mdhaffar, Yannick Estève, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Hamzah Luqman, Nizar Habash, and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed. 2026. NADI 2026: The Second Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing Shared Task. In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 1–30, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NADI 2026: The Second Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing Shared Task (Sullivan et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.1.pdf