# NADI 2025: The First Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing Shared Task

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02038 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02038/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [ECAPA-TDNN: Emphasized Channel Attention, Propagation and Aggregation in TDNN Based Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07143/) (2020)
- [Seamless: Multilingual Expressive and Streaming Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05187/) (2023)
- [VoxLingua107: a Dataset for Spoken Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12998/) (2020)
- [Voice Conversion With Just Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18975/) (2023)
- [AraT5: Text-to-Text Transformers for Arabic Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12068/) (2021)
- [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)
- [ORCA: A Challenging Benchmark for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10758/) (2022)
- [Arabic Dialect Identification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06557/) (2020)
- [A Panoramic Survey of Natural Language Processing in the Arab World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12631/) (2020)
- [NADI 2021: The Second Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08466/) (2021)
- [NADI 2023: The Fourth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16117/) (2023)
- [Arap-Tweet: A Large Multi-Dialect Twitter Corpus for Gender, Age and Language Variety Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07674/) (2018)
- [NADI 2022: The Third Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09582/) (2022)
- [Dolphin: A Challenging and Diverse Benchmark for Arabic NLG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14989/) (2023)
- [Curras + Baladi: Towards a Levantine Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09692/) (2022)
- [A Large Scale Corpus of Gulf Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02960/) (2016)
- [ClArTTS: An Open-Source Classical Arabic Text-to-Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00069/) (2023)
- [ArTST: Arabic Text and Speech Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16621/) (2023)
- [On the Robustness of Arabic Speech Dialect Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03789/) (2023)
- [Mixat: A Data Set of Bilingual Emirati-English Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02578/) (2024)
- [Neural Arabic Text Diacritization: State of the Art Results and a Novel Approach for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03531/) (2019)
- [Data Quality Issues in Multilingual Speech Datasets: The Need for Sociolinguistic Awareness and Proactive Language Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17525/) (2025)
- [Automatic Restoration of Diacritics for Speech Data Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10771/) (2023)
- [Arabic Diacritics in the Wild: Exploiting Opportunities for Improved Diacritization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05760/) (2024)
- [Dialectal Coverage And Generalization in Arabic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05872/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Habibi: Laying the Open-Source Foundation of Unified-Dialectal Arabic Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13802/) (2026)
- [ELYADATA & LIA at NADI 2025: ASR and ADI Subtasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10090/) (2025)
- [ARCADE: A City-Scale Corpus for Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02209/) (2026)
- [Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbr"ucken Dialect Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11803/) (2026)
- [Constrained CTC Decoding for Efficient Diacritic Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18946/) (2026)
- [BARRAC: Adaptation of an English Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Approach for Classification Tasks in Arabic Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38820/) (2026)
- [SHAMS: An Audio-Grounded Pronunciation Benchmark for Levantine Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01427/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the findings of the sixth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI 2025) Shared Task, which focused on Arabic speech dialect processing across three subtasks: spoken dialect identification (Subtask 1), speech recognition (Subtask 2), and diacritic restoration for spoken dialects (Subtask 3). A total of 44 teams registered, and during the testing phase, 100 valid submissions were received from eight unique teams. The distribution was as follows: 34 submissions for Subtask 1 "five teamsae, 47 submissions for Subtask 2 "six teams", and 19 submissions for Subtask 3 "two teams". The best-performing systems achieved 79.8% accuracy on Subtask 1, 35.68/12.20 WER/CER (overall average) on Subtask 2, and 55/13 WER/CER on Subtask 3. These results highlight the ongoing challenges of Arabic dialect speech processing, particularly in dialect identification, recognition, and diacritic restoration. We also summarize the methods adopted by participating teams and briefly outline directions for future editions of NADI.