Elaf S. Alsaedi

Author directory

2026

We describe our submission to three NADI 2026 subtasks: Tunisian Arabic–French–English code-switched ASR (Task 1.3), dialectal Arabic speech translation, and 20-way Arabic dialect identification (ADI). For code-switched ASR, we finetune a 2B-parameter FastConformer encoder-decoder with synthetic Tunisian speech, cross-lingual data, waveform augmentation, and checkpoint averaging, achieving 14.12% WER and ranking first overall. For speech translation, finetuning Whisper Large-v3 yields strong in-domain results but poor generalization (BLEU 5.8 on blind test), illustrating overfitting under limited data. For ADI, a classifier on frozen pretrained ASR representations outperforms full/partial finetuning, reaching 42% accuracy across 20 dialects. We highlight synthetic augmentation, checkpoint averaging, and encoder freezing as effective low-resource strategies.