Bulbul: A Dataset for Dialectal Arabic Speech Recognition

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21950v1
• Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2026 13:27:12 GMT
• Title: Bulbul: A Dataset for Dialectal Arabic Speech Recognition
• Abstract summary: We present BULBUL, a multi-dialect Arabic ASR dataset collected from 275 speakers in 11 Arab countries.<n>BULBUL includes structured dialect and sub-dialect coverage, as well as recordings of classical Arabic and modern standard Arabic spoken by participants in their native dialectal accents.
• Score: 23.17840151160424
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) faces unique challenges due to diglossia, extensive regional dialect variation, and limited speech resources. Existing speech datasets often focus on single dialects or large-scale broadcast/web data, leading to trade-offs between linguistic diversity and annotation quality. We present BULBUL, a multi-dialect Arabic ASR dataset collected from 275 speakers in 11 Arab countries. BULBUL includes structured dialect and sub-dialect coverage, as well as recordings of classical Arabic and modern standard Arabic spoken by participants in their native dialectal accents to support accent-aware modeling. The quality of the recordings was ensured through a two-level human verification process. We further benchmark a range of recent ASR systems, establishing strong baselines for modern dialectal and accented Arabic ASR.

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