Related papers: SD-QA: Spoken Dialectal Question Answering for the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various disciplines and tasks. However, benchmarking their capabilities with multilingual spoken queries remains largely unexplored. In this study, we introduce…

As conversational multimodal AI tools are increasingly adopted to process patient data for health assessment, robust benchmarks are needed to measure progress and expose failure modes under realistic conditions. Despite the importance of…

Question Answering (QA) returns concise answers or answer lists from natural language text given a context document. Many resources go into curating QA datasets to advance robust models' development. There is a surge of QA datasets for…

Confidently making progress on multilingual modeling requires challenging, trustworthy evaluations. We present TyDi QA---a question answering dataset covering 11 typologically diverse languages with 204K question-answer pairs. The languages…

In spoken question answering, QA systems are designed to answer questions from contiguous text spans within the related speech transcripts. However, the most natural way that human seek or test their knowledge is via human conversations.…

Dialectal Arabic (DA) speech data vary widely in domain coverage, dialect labeling practices, and recording conditions, complicating cross-dataset comparison and model evaluation. To characterize this landscape, we conduct a computational…

African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems --…

In recent years, we have observed a rapid advancement in speech language models (SpeechLLMs), catching up with humans' listening and reasoning abilities. SpeechLLMs have demonstrated impressive spoken dialog question-answering (SQA)…

Developing robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for Arabic requires effective strategies to manage its diversity. Existing ASR systems mainly cover the modern standard Arabic (MSA) variety and few high-resource dialects, but…

This paper proposes the creation of a Swahili Question Answering (QA) benchmark dataset, aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of Swahili in natural language processing (NLP). Drawing from established benchmarks like SQuAD, GLUE,…

Africa is home to over one-third of the world's languages, yet remains underrepresented in AI research. We introduce Afri-MCQA, the first Multilingual Cultural Question-Answering benchmark covering 7.5k Q&A pairs across 15 African languages…

We present Ara-BEST-RQ, a family of self-supervised learning (SSL) models specifically designed for multi-dialectal Arabic speech processing. Leveraging 5,640 hours of crawled Creative Commons speech and combining it with publicly available…

Spoken question answering (SQA) systems are critical for digital assistants and other real-world use cases, but evaluating their performance is a challenge due to the importance of human-spoken questions. This study presents a new…

Question-answering (QA) that comes naturally to humans is a critical component in seamless human-computer interaction. It has emerged as one of the most convenient and natural methods to interact with the web and is especially desirable in…

Reading comprehension by machine has been widely studied, but machine comprehension of spoken content is still a less investigated problem. In this paper, we release Open-Domain Spoken Question Answering Dataset (ODSQA) with more than three…

We present DialectalArabicMMLU, a new benchmark for evaluating the performance of large language models (LLMs) across Arabic dialects. While recently developed Arabic and multilingual benchmarks have advanced LLM evaluation for Modern…

Human knowledge is collectively encoded in the roughly 6500 languages spoken around the world, but it is not distributed equally across languages. Hence, for information-seeking question answering (QA) systems to adequately serve speakers…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have achieved remarkable performance on widely used benchmarks such as LibriSpeech and Fleurs. However, these benchmarks do not adequately reflect the complexities of real-world conversational…

We present Task 5 of the DCASE 2025 Challenge: an Audio Question Answering (AQA) benchmark spanning multiple domains of sound understanding. This task defines three QA subsets (Bioacoustics, Temporal Soundscapes, and Complex QA) to test…

Question answering (QA) models have shown rapid progress enabled by the availability of large, high-quality benchmark datasets. Such annotated datasets are difficult and costly to collect, and rarely exist in languages other than English,…