mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMs

arXiv 2602.07036 ↗First posted 3 Feb 2026cs.SD cs.AI cs.CLcited by 3

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Abstract (arXiv)

Audio large language models (AudioLLMs) enable instruction following over speech and general audio, but progress is limited by the scarcity of diverse, conversational, and instruction-aligned speech--text data. This gap is particularly pronounced for persona-grounded and dialectal interactions, where collecting real multi-speaker recordings remains costly and slow. We introduce MENASpeechBank, a reference speech bank comprising ~18K high-quality utterances from 124 speakers spanning multiple MENA countries, covering English, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and regional Arabic varieties. We develop a controllable data pipeline that (i) constructs persona profiles enriched with World Values Survey (WVS) inspired attributes, (ii) defines a taxonomy driven ~5Kconversational scenarios, (iii) matches personas to scenarios via semantic similarity, (iv) generates ~417K role-play conversations with an LLM where the user speaks as the persona and the assistant behaves as a helpful agent, and (v) produces speaker-conditioned user-turn audio (synthetic) from reference recordings to preserve speaker diversity. We evaluate synthetic and human recorded conversations and provide an analysis. We will make the MENASpeechBank available for the community.(hrefhttps://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/MenaSpeechBank)

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 29 of its 59 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2026.

Builds on

29 of 59 references.

References · 29

  1. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
  2. 2022Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructionscited by 2,674
  3. 2018MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modellingcited by 760
  4. 2023Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizerscited by 737
  5. 2023Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Modelscited by 591
  6. 2023SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilitiescited by 518
  7. 2019Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Datasetcited by 426
  8. 2021SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkitcited by 404
  9. 2023Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scalecited by 373
  10. 2023AudioGPT: Understanding and Generating Speech, Music, Sound, and Talking Headcited by 264
  11. 2016A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Modelcited by 221
  12. 2024AIR-Bench: Benchmarking Large Audio-Language Models via Generative Comprehensioncited by 215
17 more
  1. 2021NISQA: A Deep CNN-Self-Attention Model for Multidimensional Speech Quality Prediction with Crowdsourced Datasetscited by 189
  2. 2024XTTS: a Massively Multilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Modelcited by 174
  3. 2019Taskmaster-1: Toward a Realistic and Diverse Dialog Datasetcited by 139
  4. 2023Spoken Question Answering and Speech Continuation Using Spectrogram-Powered LLMcited by 92
  5. 2025Fanar: An Arabic-Centric Multimodal Generative AI Platformcited by 67
  6. 2023Faithful Persona-based Conversational Dataset Generation with Large Language Modelscited by 45
  7. 2021QASR: QCRI Aljazeera Speech Resource -- A Large Scale Annotated Arabic Speech Corpuscited by 38
  8. 2024NativQA: Multilingual Culturally-Aligned Natural Query for LLMscited by 30
  9. 2023NADI 2023: The Fourth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Taskcited by 29
  10. 2025Beyond Seeing: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Tool-Enabled Image Perception, Transformation, and Reasoningcited by 28
  11. 2025Audio MultiChallenge: A Multi-Turn Evaluation of Spoken Dialogue Systems on Natural Human Interactioncited by 18
  12. 2024CantTalkAboutThis: Aligning Language Models to Stay on Topic in Dialoguescited by 15
  13. 2025The Landscape of Arabic Large Language Models (ALLMs): A New Era for Arabic Language Technologycited by 12
  14. 2025Benchmarking Contextual and Paralinguistic Reasoning in Speech-LLMs: A Case Study with In-the-Wild Datacited by 10
  15. 2024Instruction Data Generation and Unsupervised Adaptation for Speech Language Modelscited by 9
  16. 2025SpokenNativQA: Multilingual Everyday Spoken Queries for LLMscited by 8
  17. 2025OASIS: A Multilingual and Multimodal Dataset for Culturally Grounded Spoken Visual QAcited by 5

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

  1. 2026Said Aloud, Read Different: Cross-Modal Instability in Multimodal Modelscited by 2
  2. 2026WASIL: In-the-Wild Arabic Spoken Interactions with LLMscited by 1
  3. 2026Aslema at NADI 2026: Data Augmentation for Intent Recognition and Slot Fillingcited by 1