This paper presents the KSAA-2026 Shared Task on Arabic Speech Dictation with Automatic Diacritization, addressing a persistent challenge in Arabic NLP. The task focuses on transforming speech transcripts into fully diacritized Arabic text by leveraging both the speech signal and its undiacritized transcript. Unlike conventional ASR tasks that focus on transcription, this task integrates acoustic and textual information to improve diacritization accuracy. The shared task consists of two subtasks: (1) Data Contribution, where participants recorded and reviewed speech data through the VoiceWall platform, resulting in 2,160 recordings, and (2) Diacritization, where 5 teams developed systems that generate fully diacritized text from speech and undiacritized transcripts. The dataset includes approximately 5 hours of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and multi-dialectal speech with fully diacritized references. Experimental results show that several participant systems outperform the provided baselines, and that incorporating speech information and fine-tuning improves performance compared to text-only approaches. KSAA-2026 shared task establishes a benchmark for multimodal Arabic diacritization and supports the development of robust systems for applications in education, accessibility, and speech-driven text generation.

This paper provides an overview of Contemporary Arabic Lexicon (Mu’jam Arriyadh). It is a contemporary and inclusive Arabic dictionary that has been specifically developed to cater to the needs of both native and non-native Arabic speakers. The corpus utilized in this study is derived from the Arabic Contemporary Corpus for Analysis (ACCA), which encompasses a vast collection of 450 million words of Modern Standard Arabic spanning the previous century. Significantly, the lexicon in question prioritizes lemma-based entries over root forms, hence enhancing its user-friendliness and adaptability across different contexts. The resource offers comprehensive linguistic data pertaining to a wide array of Arabic vocabulary, encompassing morphological, morph-syntactic, and semantic aspects. The Lexicon has been developed in accordance with the ISO 24613 standard, which improves its ability to be processed by machines and facilitates the utilization of natural language processing systems. The database encompasses a range of linguistic aspects, such as synonyms, antonyms, and root forms, offering a comprehensive compilation. Mu’jam Arriyadh is a contemporary Arabic lexicon that is designed to be accessible to users, compatible with machine processing, and highly beneficial for anyone studying the language, conducting research, and utilizing natural language processing technologies.

Spontaneous Arabic speech is scarce in current corpora, and it is not well represented. This poses a limitation invisibility of spontaneous Arabic to automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker diarization, and sociolinguistic research. The Saudi ASWAT project fills a major gap by creating the first nationwide corpus of natural Saudi speech, where data has been recorded and transcribed under a systematic methodology and ecologically valid conditions. The corpus aims to collect 2,500 hours of natural conversations from a diverse range of participants. These has been selected from five major Saudi regional varieties, Najdi (Central), Eastern, Hijazi (Western), Northern, and Southern, covering more than fifty five local varieties. Speech has been recorded by trained fieldworkers using participants own devices to reflect real-life variation. The annotated data incorporate a variety of speaker demographics, regional vocabularies which differ from the standard lexicon, and structured metadata. TF–IDF profiling shows regional differences in a range of performing words. Data also represent balanced age and gender sampling to support studies of intergenerational and sociophonetic variation. Saudi ASWAT provides the most linguistically diverse resources of Saudi Arabia to date. Additionally, it establishes an ethical governed framework for Arabic speech data creation to enable advances in both computational modeling and linguistic research.

The impressive advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in English has not been matched across all languages. In particular, LLM performance in Arabic lags behind, due to data scarcity, linguistic diversity of Arabic and its dialects, morphological complexity, etc. Progress is further hindered by the quality of Arabic benchmarks, which typically rely on static, publicly available data, lack comprehensive task coverage, or do not provide dedicated platforms with blind test sets. This makes it challenging to measure actual progress and to mitigate data contamination. Here, we aim to bridge these gaps. In particular, we introduce BALSAM, a comprehensive, community-driven benchmark aimed at advancing Arabic LLM development and evaluation. It includes 78 NLP tasks from 14 broad categories, with 52K examples divided into 37K test and 15K development, and a centralized, transparent platform for blind evaluation. We envision BALSAM as a unifying platform that sets standards and promotes collaborative research to advance Arabic LLM capabilities.

This paper outlines the KSAA-CAD shared task, highlighting the Contemporary Arabic Language Dictionary within the scenario of developing a Reverse Dictionary (RD) system and enhancing Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) capabilities. The first KSAA-RD (Al-Matham et al., 2023) highlighted significant gaps in the domain of RDs, which are designed to retrieve words by their meanings or definitions. This shared task comprises two tasks: RD and WSD. The RD task focuses on identifying word embeddings that most accurately match a given definition, termed a “gloss,” in Arabic. Conversely, the WSD task involves determining the specific meaning of a word in context, particularly when the word has multiple meanings. The winning team achieved the highest-ranking score of 0.0644 in RD using Electra embeddings. In this paper, we describe the methods employed by the participating teams and provide insights into the future direction of KSAA-CAD.