# Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04527 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04527/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [Google USM: Scaling Automatic Speech Recognition Beyond 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01037/) (2023)
- [pyannote.audio: neural building blocks for speaker diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01255/) (2019)
- [End-to-end speaker segmentation for overlap-aware resegmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04045/) (2021)
- [YouTube-ASL: A Large-Scale, Open-Domain American Sign Language-English Parallel Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15162/) (2023)
- [Speech Recognition Challenge in the Wild: Arabic MGB-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07276/) (2017)
- [AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00274/) (2023)
- [Making More of Little Data: Improving Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognition Using Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10951/) (2023)
- [NADI 2024: The Fifth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04910/) (2024)
- [N-Shot Benchmarking of Whisper on Diverse Arabic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02902/) (2023)
- [STT4SG-350: A Speech Corpus for All Swiss German Dialect Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18855/) (2023)
- [On the Robustness of Arabic Speech Dialect Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03789/) (2023)
- [Arabic Speech Recognition by End-to-End, Modular Systems and Human](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08454/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Data Quality Issues in Multilingual Speech Datasets: The Need for Sociolinguistic Awareness and Proactive Language Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17525/) (2025)
- [Open Universal Arabic ASR Leaderboard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13788/) (2024)
- [The ML-SUPERB 2.0 Challenge: Towards Inclusive ASR Benchmarking for All Language Varieties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07139/) (2025)
- [Konooz: Multi-domain Multi-dialect Corpus for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12615/) (2025)
- [ADI-20: Arabic Dialect Identification dataset and models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10070/) (2025)
- [LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18490/) (2026)
- [Advancing Arabic Speech Recognition Through Large-Scale Weakly Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12254/) (2025)
- [WASIL: In-the-Wild Arabic Spoken Interactions with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16364/) (2026)
- [Aslema at NADI 2026: Data Augmentation for Intent Recognition and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18689/) (2026)
- [Bulbul: A Dataset for Dialectal Arabic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21950/) (2026)
- [Voice Conversion Improves Cross-Domain Robustness for Spoken Arabic Dialect Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24713/) (2025)
- [ArFake: A Robust Framework for Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Spoofing Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22808/) (2025)
- [CTC-DID: CTC-Based Arabic dialect identification for streaming applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12199/) (2026)
- [Ramsa: A Large Sociolinguistically Rich Emirati Arabic Speech Corpus for ASR and TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08125/) (2026)
- [SLURP-TN : Resource for Tunisian Dialect Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21940/) (2026)
- [CV-18 NER: Augmented Common Voice for Named Entity Recognition from Arabic Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02209/) (2026)
- [Dziri Voicebot: An End-to-End Low-Resource Speech-to-Speech Conversational System for Algerian Dialect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26003/) (2026)
- [Enemray: Toward Capable Language Models for Hassaniya](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14829/) (2026)
- [NADI 2026: The Second Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27086/) (2026)
- [Almieyar: A Culturally Grounded Benchmark for Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35564/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.