CTC-DID: CTC-Based Arabic dialect identification for streaming applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Farooq, Muhammad Umar, Saz, Oscar
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Farooq, Muhammad Umar
Saz, Oscar
author_facet Farooq, Muhammad Umar
Saz, Oscar
contents This paper proposes a Dialect Identification (DID) approach inspired by the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss function as used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). CTC-DID frames the dialect identification task as a limited-vocabulary ASR system, where dialect tags are treated as a sequence of labels for a given utterance. For training, the repetition of dialect tags in transcriptions is estimated either using a proposed Language-Agnostic Heuristic (LAH) approach or a pre-trained ASR model. The method is evaluated on the low-resource Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) task, with experimental results demonstrating that an SSL-based CTC-DID model, trained on a limited dataset, outperforms both fine-tuned Whisper and ECAPA-TDNN models. Notably, CTC-DID also surpasses these models in zero-shot evaluation on the Casablanca dataset. The proposed approach is found to be more robust to shorter utterances and is shown to be easily adaptable for streaming, real-time applications, with minimal performance degradation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_12199
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CTC-DID: CTC-Based Arabic dialect identification for streaming applications
Farooq, Muhammad Umar
Saz, Oscar
Computation and Language
This paper proposes a Dialect Identification (DID) approach inspired by the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss function as used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). CTC-DID frames the dialect identification task as a limited-vocabulary ASR system, where dialect tags are treated as a sequence of labels for a given utterance. For training, the repetition of dialect tags in transcriptions is estimated either using a proposed Language-Agnostic Heuristic (LAH) approach or a pre-trained ASR model. The method is evaluated on the low-resource Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) task, with experimental results demonstrating that an SSL-based CTC-DID model, trained on a limited dataset, outperforms both fine-tuned Whisper and ECAPA-TDNN models. Notably, CTC-DID also surpasses these models in zero-shot evaluation on the Casablanca dataset. The proposed approach is found to be more robust to shorter utterances and is shown to be easily adaptable for streaming, real-time applications, with minimal performance degradation.
title CTC-DID: CTC-Based Arabic dialect identification for streaming applications
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12199