# QASR: QCRI Aljazeera Speech Resource -- A Large Scale Annotated Arabic Speech Corpus

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.13000 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13000/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [ESPnet: End-to-End Speech Processing Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00015/) (2018)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [State-of-the-art Speech Recognition With Sequence-to-Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01769/) (2017)
- [VoxLingua107: a Dataset for Spoken Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12998/) (2020)
- [Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05256/) (2016)
- [Speech Recognition Challenge in the Wild: Arabic MGB-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07276/) (2017)
- [NADI 2020: The First Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11334/) (2020)
- [Arabic Dialect Identification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06557/) (2020)
- [Towards One Model to Rule All: Multilingual Strategy for Dialectal Code-Switching Arabic ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14779/) (2021)
- [English Conversational Telephone Speech Recognition by Humans and Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02136/) (2017)
- [Data Augmentation for End-to-end Code-switching Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02160/) (2020)
- [Arabic Speech Recognition by End-to-End, Modular Systems and Human](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08454/) (2021)
- [MIT-QCRI Arabic Dialect Identification System for the 2017 Multi-Genre Broadcast Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00387/) (2017)
- [Frame-level speaker embeddings for text-independent speaker recognition and analysis of end-to-end model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04437/) (2018)
- [MCE 2018: The 1st Multi-target Speaker Detection and Identification Challenge Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04240/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Arabic Code-Switching Speech Recognition using Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01573/) (2021)
- [LAraBench: Benchmarking Arabic AI with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14982/) (2023)
- [Representativeness as a Forgotten Lesson for Multilingual and Code-switched Data Collection and Preparation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20470/) (2023)
- [ArTST: Arabic Text and Speech Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16621/) (2023)
- [Mixat: A Data Set of Bilingual Emirati-English Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02578/) (2024)
- [Textual Data Augmentation for Arabic-English Code-Switching Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02550/) (2022)
- [ZAEBUC-Spoken: A Multilingual Multidialectal Arabic-English Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18182/) (2024)
- [MSR-86K: An Evolving, Multilingual Corpus with 86,300 Hours of Transcribed Audio for Speech Recognition Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18301/) (2024)
- [Automatic Restoration of Diacritics for Speech Data Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10771/) (2023)
- [Adapting the adapters for code-switching in multilingual ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07423/) (2023)
- [Multi-Dialect Vietnamese: Task, Dataset, Baseline Models and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03458/) (2024)
- [Tell me Habibi, is it Real or Fake?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22581/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Word Error Rate Estimation: e-WER3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00649/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Code-switched Arabic NLP: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13419/) (2025)
- [OASIS: A Multilingual and Multimodal Dataset for Culturally Grounded Spoken Visual QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06371/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Data Selection for TTS: Using Arabic Broadcast News as a Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09099/) (2023)
- [To Distill or Not to Distill? On the Robustness of Robust Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04512/) (2024)
- [uDistil-Whisper: Label-Free Data Filtering for Knowledge Distillation in Low-Data Regimes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01257/) (2024)
- [Open Universal Arabic ASR Leaderboard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13788/) (2024)
- [ArVoice: A Multi-Speaker Dataset for Arabic Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20506/) (2025)
- [Code-Switching in End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07741/) (2025)
- [Towards Zero-Shot Text-To-Speech for Arabic Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16751/) (2024)
- [ParsVoice: A Large-Scale Multi-Speaker Persian Speech Corpus for Text-to-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10774/) (2025)
- [Multi-Task Instruction Tuning via Data Scheduling for Low-Resource Arabic SpeechLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12494/) (2026)
- [Habibi: Laying the Open-Source Foundation of Unified-Dialectal Arabic Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13802/) (2026)
- [MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07036/) (2026)
- [A New Benchmark for Evaluating Automatic Speech Recognition in the Arabic Call Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04280/) (2024)
- [SAGE: Spliced-Audio Generated Data for Enhancing Foundational Models in Low-Resource Arabic-English Code-Switched Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22143/) (2025)
- [Ara-Best-RQ: Multi Dialectal Arabic SSL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21900/) (2026)
- [HARNESS: Lightweight Distilled Arabic Speech Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14689/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce the largest transcribed Arabic speech corpus, QASR, collected from the broadcast domain. This multi-dialect speech dataset contains 2,000 hours of speech sampled at 16kHz crawled from Aljazeera news channel. The dataset is released with lightly supervised transcriptions, aligned with the audio segments. Unlike previous datasets, QASR contains linguistically motivated segmentation, punctuation, speaker information among others. QASR is suitable for training and evaluating speech recognition systems, acoustics- and/or linguistics- based Arabic dialect identification, punctuation restoration, speaker identification, speaker linking, and potentially other NLP modules for spoken data. In addition to QASR transcription, we release a dataset of 130M words to aid in designing and training a better language model. We show that end-to-end automatic speech recognition trained on QASR reports a competitive word error rate compared to the previous MGB-2 corpus. We report baseline results for downstream natural language processing tasks such as named entity recognition using speech transcript. We also report the first baseline for Arabic punctuation restoration. We make the corpus available for the research community.