Bulbul: A Dataset for Dialectal Arabic Speech Recognition

Ahmed Ashraf; Aisha Alansari; Fadel Al Abbas; Nada Almarwani; Samah Aloufi; Saad Ezzini; Maged S. Al-Shaibani; Doaa Dalaq; AbdelRahim A. Elmadany; Muhammad Abdul-Mageed; Mohamed Mehdi Trigui; Dania Refai; Layan Refai; Mohamed Akrout; Mustafa Jarrar; Wasfi G. Al-Khatib; Alaa Dalaq; Darin El-Nakla; Samir Abdaljalil; Abdulrahman Al-Fakih; Nour El Imane Zeghib; Moussa Redah; Salmane Chafik; Mohamed El-Attar; Rima Grati; Sarah Kohail; Malak Alkhorasani; Khadijah Al Safwan; Ismail M. Mudhaffar; Ali Altam; Ahmed Al-Shaikh; Adnan Saeed; Hamzah Luqman

arXiv · 2608.21950

Bulbul: A Dataset for Dialectal Arabic Speech Recognition

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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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Ahmed Ashraf, Aisha Alansari, Fadel Al Abbas, Nada Almarwani, Samah Aloufi, Saad Ezzini, Maged S. Al-Shaibani, Doaa Dalaq, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Mohamed Mehdi Trigui, Dania Refai, Layan Refai, Mohamed Akrout, Mustafa Jarrar, Wasfi G. Al-Khatib, Alaa Dalaq, Darin El-Nakla, Samir Abdaljalil, Abdulrahman Al-Fakih, Nour El Imane Zeghib, Moussa Redah, Salmane Chafik, Mohamed El-Attar, Rima Grati, Sarah Kohail, Malak Alkhorasani, Khadijah Al Safwan, Ismail M. Mudhaffar, Ali Altam, Ahmed Al-Shaikh, Adnan Saeed, Hamzah Luqman. 2026-08-22. Bulbul: A Dataset for Dialectal Arabic Speech Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21950

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