Raghad Alshalan
Author directory2026
Telco-GAIA: Bilingual Benchmark for Agents in Telecom Domain
Dmitrii Khizbullin | Zaid Alyafeai | Abdelrahman Eldesokey | Nourah AlSultan | Raghad Alshalan | Bernard Ghanem | David R. Pugh
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Dmitrii Khizbullin | Zaid Alyafeai | Abdelrahman Eldesokey | Nourah AlSultan | Raghad Alshalan | Bernard Ghanem | David R. Pugh
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
We introduce Telco-GAIA, a bilingual, multi-modal benchmark for evaluating tool-using agents on the data of a real-world telecommunications operator. Telco-GAIA comprises 100 human-verified question-answering tasks, in English and Arabic, that each demand multi-hop reasoning (4.2 hops on average) over three heterogeneous sources: a static website snapshot (HTML, images, and linked PDFs), a synthetic relational SQL database, and external web archives, spanning text, image, and tabular modalities. The benchmark is delivered as a sandboxed Docker environment and scored by normalized exact string matching, making evaluation objective, deterministic, and reproducible over time without any LLM-as-a-Judge. Evaluating a purpose-built reference agent across twelve commercial and open LLMs, we find Telco-GAIA challenging: even the strongest model solves only 71% of tasks; under a moderate cost budget, this falls to about 40%, and the visually grounded categories remain the weakest, where the average backend scores below 30%, leaving substantial headroom in document and image understanding. Telco-GAIA offers a rigorous, reproducible testbed for enterprise agents and a template for constructing closed-domain benchmarks.
2025
Dialectal Coverage And Generalization in Arabic Speech Recognition
Amirbek Djanibekov | Hawau Olamide Toyin | Raghad Alshalan | Abdullah Alatir | Hanan Aldarmaki
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Amirbek Djanibekov | Hawau Olamide Toyin | Raghad Alshalan | Abdullah Alatir | Hanan Aldarmaki
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Developing robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for Arabic requires effective strategies to manage its diversity. Existing ASR systems mainly cover the modern standard Arabic (MSA) variety and few high-resource dialects, but fall short in coverage and generalization across the multitude of spoken variants. Code-switching with English and French is also common in different regions of the Arab world, which challenges the performance of monolingual Arabic models. In this work, we introduce a suite of ASR models optimized to effectively recognize multiple variants of spoken Arabic, including MSA, various dialects, and code-switching. We provide open-source pre-trained models that cover data from 17 Arabic-speaking countries, and fine-tuned MSA and dialectal ASR models that include at least 11 variants, as well as multi-lingual ASR models covering embedded languages in code-switched utterances. We evaluate ASR performance across these spoken varieties and demonstrate both coverage and performance gains compared to prior models.