Abjad-Kids: An Arabic Speech Classification Dataset for Primary Education

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Snoubara, Abdul Aziz, Al_Maradni, Baraa, Al_Naal, Haya, Al_Madrmani, Malek, Jdini, Roaa, Zarzour, Seedra, Jallad, Khloud Al
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Snoubara, Abdul Aziz
Al_Maradni, Baraa
Al_Naal, Haya
Al_Madrmani, Malek
Jdini, Roaa
Zarzour, Seedra
Jallad, Khloud Al
author_facet Snoubara, Abdul Aziz
Al_Maradni, Baraa
Al_Naal, Haya
Al_Madrmani, Malek
Jdini, Roaa
Zarzour, Seedra
Jallad, Khloud Al
contents Speech-based AI educational applications have gained significant interest in recent years, particularly for children. However, children speech research remains limited due to the lack of publicly available datasets, especially for low-resource languages such as Arabic.This paper presents Abjad-Kids, an Arabic speech dataset designed for kindergarten and primary education, focusing on fundamental learning of alphabets, numbers, and colors. The dataset consists of 46397 audio samples collected from children aged 3 - 12 years, covering 141 classes. All samples were recorded under controlled specifications to ensure consistency in duration, sampling rate, and format. To address high intra-class similarity among Arabic phonemes and the limited samples per class, we propose a hierarchical audio classification based on CNN-LSTM architectures. Our proposed methodology decomposes alphabet recognition into a two-stage process: an initial grouping classification model followed by specialized classifiers for each group. Both strategies: static linguistic-based grouping and dynamic clustering-based grouping, were evaluated. Experimental results demonstrate that static linguistic-based grouping achieves superior performance. Comparisons between traditional machine learning with deep learning approaches, highlight the effectiveness of CNN-LSTM models combined with data augmentation. Despite achieving promising results, most of our experiments indicate a challenge with overfitting, which is likely due to the limited number of samples, even after data augmentation and model regularization. Thus, future work may focus on collecting additional data to address this issue. Abjad-Kids will be publicly available. We hope that Abjad-Kids enrich children representation in speech dataset, and be a good resource for future research in Arabic speech classification for kids.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_20255
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Abjad-Kids: An Arabic Speech Classification Dataset for Primary Education
Snoubara, Abdul Aziz
Al_Maradni, Baraa
Al_Naal, Haya
Al_Madrmani, Malek
Jdini, Roaa
Zarzour, Seedra
Jallad, Khloud Al
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Speech-based AI educational applications have gained significant interest in recent years, particularly for children. However, children speech research remains limited due to the lack of publicly available datasets, especially for low-resource languages such as Arabic.This paper presents Abjad-Kids, an Arabic speech dataset designed for kindergarten and primary education, focusing on fundamental learning of alphabets, numbers, and colors. The dataset consists of 46397 audio samples collected from children aged 3 - 12 years, covering 141 classes. All samples were recorded under controlled specifications to ensure consistency in duration, sampling rate, and format. To address high intra-class similarity among Arabic phonemes and the limited samples per class, we propose a hierarchical audio classification based on CNN-LSTM architectures. Our proposed methodology decomposes alphabet recognition into a two-stage process: an initial grouping classification model followed by specialized classifiers for each group. Both strategies: static linguistic-based grouping and dynamic clustering-based grouping, were evaluated. Experimental results demonstrate that static linguistic-based grouping achieves superior performance. Comparisons between traditional machine learning with deep learning approaches, highlight the effectiveness of CNN-LSTM models combined with data augmentation. Despite achieving promising results, most of our experiments indicate a challenge with overfitting, which is likely due to the limited number of samples, even after data augmentation and model regularization. Thus, future work may focus on collecting additional data to address this issue. Abjad-Kids will be publicly available. We hope that Abjad-Kids enrich children representation in speech dataset, and be a good resource for future research in Arabic speech classification for kids.
title Abjad-Kids: An Arabic Speech Classification Dataset for Primary Education
topic Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20255