Ahmed Wasfy

Author directory

2026

We describe the KAND CA systems for all five subtasks of the NADI 2026 shared task on multidialectal Arabic speech processing. For the three ASR subtasks, a single family of staged, fully fine-tuned Whisper large-v3 models — broad dialectal adaptation, then only task-matched gold data — is combined with task-specific levers: an mT5 spellingcorrection post-editor trained on the task references (Subtask 1.1, final country-average WER 0.5111), chained continue-fine-tuning through the Subtask 1.1 data before the Mixed- ASR dev split (Subtask 1.2, WER 0.48), and a fresh two-epoch schedule over a 46K-clip external gold Tunisian–French corpus with an accent-only French post-pass (Subtask 1.3, WER 15.21%). For spoken dialect identification (Task 2), where in-domain accuracy anti-predicted blind-test accuracy, our system fuses an architecturally distinct FastConformerencoder classifier, a decorrelated enhancedaudio view, and an ASR-transcript text route, reaching 0.5114 accuracy. For dialectal TTS (Subtask 3) we submitted 4,001 voice-cloned clips across ten dialects (UTMOS 2.72). We also report extensive negative results and release our models, correctors, and code publicly.