WhiteHouse: Translation of the Casablanca Corpus for Multi-dialectal Arabic Speech Translation

Fethi Bougares, Salima Mdhaffar, Yannick Estève


Abstract
Remarkable progress has been made recently in the speech processing of Arabic dialects. This is primarily due to the availability of large multilingual pre-trained models as well as the development of multiple well-annotated datasets that support training, fine-tuning, and evaluation of various speech models. However, most existing research on Arabic speech processing did not consider Automatic Speech Translation (AST) and focused mainly on Dialect Identification (DI) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks. To address this gap, we introduce WhiteHouse, the first multi-dialectal Arabic-English Speech Translation Corpus. WhiteHouse supplements the recently created Casablanca dataset with English translation for each utterance in the transcripts. This results in a three-way parallel speech-transcription-translation multi-dialectal Arabic dataset. WhiteHouse dataset is used to evaluate various SoTA speech translation models. Our experiments show that SoTA speech translation models performs poorly when evaluated on Arabic dialectal conditions. All the data used during training and testing are released for public use and further improvements
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.463
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
5849–5855
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-463
DOI:
10.63317/4zqn965acien
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fethi Bougares, Salima Mdhaffar, and Yannick Estève. 2026. WhiteHouse: Translation of the Casablanca Corpus for Multi-dialectal Arabic Speech Translation. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5849–5855, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
WhiteHouse: Translation of the Casablanca Corpus for Multi-dialectal Arabic Speech Translation (Bougares et al., LREC 2026)
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