Aslema at NADI 2026: Data Augmentation for Intent Recognition and Slot Filling

Tajwaar Shafiq, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury


Abstract
We present Aslema, our system for NADI 2026 Shared Task 5, which consists of two subtasks: intent recognition and slot filling. We evaluate four omni LLMs in a zero-shot setting and compare them with fine-tuned models. Our results show that fine-tuning consistently outperforms zero-shot inference. We further explore synthetic data augmentation by using an LLM to generate culturally grounded Tunisian Derja utterances, followed by voice cloning to generate synthetic speech. Incorporating this synthetic data improves performance on both tasks. Our final submitted system, based on Qwen3-Omni-30B and trained with a mixture of original and synthetic data, achieves 86.8% intent accuracy and 34.7 WER on the devtest split. On the official test set it ranks 1st in slot filling (59.5 CoER) and 4th among 5 teams in intent recognition (66.1% accuracy). We release our experimental scripts and the synthetic dataset to support further research.
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.3
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:
37–46
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.3/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tajwaar Shafiq, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, and Shammur Absar Chowdhury. 2026. Aslema at NADI 2026: Data Augmentation for Intent Recognition and Slot Filling. In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 37–46, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Aslema at NADI 2026: Data Augmentation for Intent Recognition and Slot Filling (Shafiq et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.3.pdf