6 papers
AraYoungVoices: A Diverse L1/L2 Corpus of Arabic Child and Adolescent Speech
Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Zien Sheikh Ali, Houssam Eddine-Othman Lachemat +1
State-of-the-art ASR systems primarily target native adult speech, leading to substantial performance gaps for children, adolescents, and L2 speakers. We introduce AraYoungVoices,…
ImageEval 2026: Culturally Grounded Arabic Multimodal Evaluation
Samir Abdaljalil, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Ahlam Bashiti +11
We present an overview of the ImageEval 2026 shared task on culturally grounded Arabic multimodal evaluation. It includes two tasks: (i) AynVQA, covering spoken visual question ans…
Multi-turn Conversational AI from Text to Multimodal Interaction: Data, Models, Evaluation, and Open Challenges
Syeda Faiza Ahmed, Syeda Faiza Ahmed Sara, Zien Sheikh Ali +3
Conversational AI is moving beyond isolated text prompts toward sustained, multimodal interaction. In real conversations, users clarify goals, revise requests, interrupt responses,…
WASIL: In-the-Wild Arabic Spoken Interactions with LLMs
Zien Sheikh Ali, Hamdy Mubarak, Soon-Gyo Jung +3
Large Language Models (LLMs) voice assistants are commonly built as cascaded Automatic Speech recognition (ASR) to LLM systems, where recognition errors can distort user intent. Di…
MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMs
Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Rabindra Nath Nandi +2
Audio large language models (AudioLLMs) enable instruction following over speech and general audio, but progress is limited by the scarcity of diverse, conversational, and instruct…
OASIS: A Multilingual and Multimodal Dataset for Culturally Grounded Spoken Visual QA
Firoj Alam, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Md. Arid Hasan +8
Large-scale multimodal models achieve strong results on tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA), but they are often limited when queries require cultural and visual information,…