Mohamedou Tourad


2024

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Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition
Bashar Talafha | Karima Kadaoui | Samar Magdy | Mariem Habiboullah | Chafei Chafei | Ahmed El-Shangiti | Hiba Zayed | Mohamedou Tourad | Rahaf Alhamouri | Rwaa Assi | Aisha Alraeesi | Hour Mohamed | Fakhraddin Alwajih | Abdelrahman Mohamed | Abdellah El Mekki | El Moatez Billah Nagoudi | Benelhadj Saadia | Hamzah Alsayadi | Walid Al-Dhabyani | Sara Shatnawi | Yasir Ech-chammakhy | Amal Makouar | Yousra Berrachedi | Mustafa Jarrar | Shady Shehata | Ismail Berrada | Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In spite of the recent progress in speech processing, the majority of world languages and dialects remain uncovered. This situation only furthers an already wide technological divide, thereby hindering technological and socioeconomic inclusion. This challenge is largely due to the absence of datasets that can empower diverse speech systems. In this paper, we seek to mitigate this obstacle for a number of Arabic dialects by presenting Casablanca, a large-scale community-driven effort to collect and transcribe a multi-dialectal Arabic dataset. The dataset covers eight dialects: Algerian, Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, and Yemeni, and includes annotations for transcription, gender, dialect, and code-switching. We also develop a number of strong baselines exploiting Casablanca. The project page for Casablanca is accessible at: www.dlnlp.ai/speech/casablanca.