Nuha-Speech: Building General-Purpose Arabic Speech-LLMs

Yingzhi Wang, Reem Alhazzani, Muhammad AL-Qurishi


Abstract
As Speech Large Language Models (speech-LLMs) become increasingly multilingual, Arabic remains significantly underrepresented, highlighting the need for dedicated infrastructure to train and evaluate Arabic speech-LLMs. To address this gap, we introduce Nuha-Speech, a comprehensive initiative to develop general-purpose Arabic speech-LLMs spanning dataset construction, model training, and systematic evaluation. Specifically, we constructed a large-scale Arabic Speech Question-Answering (SQA) corpus comprising over 1.5 million training samples to allow instruction tuning over a broad range of core speech tasks. Then, the corpus was used for supervised fine-tuning based on Qwen-Omni model variants at different scales. Finally, we designed an evaluation framework featuring diverse tasks and tailored metrics. Through this work, we aim to establish foundational infrastructures for Arabic Speech-LLMs under constraints imposed by limited Arabic speech resources.
Anthology ID:
2026.salma-1.2
Volume:
The Proceedings of Speech and Audio Language Models Workshop (2nd Edition)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Santosh T.Y.S.S., Sreyan Ghosh, Ramani Duraiswami, Shinji Watanabe, Siddhant Arora, Sonal Kumar, Yossi Adi, Dinesh Manocha, Leibny Paola Garcia Perera
Venues:
SALMA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11–17
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.salma-1.2/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yingzhi Wang, Reem Alhazzani, and Muhammad AL-Qurishi. 2026. Nuha-Speech: Building General-Purpose Arabic Speech-LLMs. In The Proceedings of Speech and Audio Language Models Workshop (2nd Edition), pages 11–17, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Nuha-Speech: Building General-Purpose Arabic Speech-LLMs (Wang et al., SALMA 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.salma-1.2.pdf