SHAMS: An Audio-Grounded Pronunciation Benchmark for Levantine Arabic

arXiv:2610.01427 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-10-01 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-10-01

Updated: 2026-10-01

Code: https://github.com/bensapirstein/shams

Terminology

• Benchmark — 26× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Levantine Arabic — 13× in this paper
• Modern Standard Arabic — 3× in this paper
• Transformer — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Annotator Agreement — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Commentary — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative AI — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• International Phonetic Alphabet — 2× in this paper
• Ablation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Accuracy — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Actor — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Automatic Speech Recognition — 1× in this paper
• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Character Error Rate — 1× in this paper
• Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Diacritic Error Rate — 1× in this paper
• Downstream Tasks — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fidelity — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Foundation Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Quantization — 1× in this paper · explained in 12 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Word Error Rate — 1× in this paper

Sources

• SeamlessM4T: Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation
• Phonikud: Overcoming Phonetic Underspecification for Hebrew Text-To-Speech
• POWSM: A Phonetic Open Whisper-Style Speech Foundation Model
• ReNikud: Audio-Supervised Hebrew Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion
• Arab Voices: Mapping Standard and Dialectal Arabic Speech Technology
• Universal Automatic Phonetic Transcription into the International Phonetic Alphabet
• Are LLMs Good Text Diacritizers? An Arabic and Yoruba Case Study

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