Papers by Karima Kadaoui
Commonsense Reasoning in Arab Culture (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Abdelrahman Sadallah, Junior Cedric Tonga, Khalid Almubarak, Saeed Almheiri, Farah Atif, Chatrine Qwaider, Karima Kadaoui, Sara Shatnawi, Yaser Alesh, Fajri Koto
| Challenge: | Existing studies on commonsense reasoning in Arabic have relied on machine translations that lack cultural depth and introduce anglocentric biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense reasoning dataset in Arabic that covers 13 Arab countries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers 13 countries across the Gulf, Levant, North Africa, and the Nile Valley. |
To Distill or Not to Distill? On the Robustness of Robust Knowledge Distillation (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) are computationallyintensive and lack proper comprehensive evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill knowledge from large teacher models into smaller student variants that are more efficient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on standard benchmarks and dialectal data. |
JEEM: Vision-Language Understanding in Four Arabic Dialects (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Karima Kadaoui, Hanin Atwany, Hamdan Al-Ali, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Ali Mekky, Sergei Tilga, Natalia Fedorova, Ekaterina Artemova, Hanan Aldarmaki, Yova Kementchedjhieva
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation datasets feature Western-centric images and English text, while their non-English counterparts are often derived from the latter. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on visual understanding across four Arabic-speaking countries: Jordan, The Emirates, Egypt, and Morocco. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model underperforms in visual understanding and dialect-specific generation across four Arabic-speaking countries. |
Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Bashar Talafha, Karima Kadaoui, Samar Magdy, Mariem Habiboullah, Chafei Chafei, Ahmed El-Shangiti, Hiba Zayed, Mohamedou Tourad, Rahaf Alhamouri, Rwaa Assi, Aisha Alraeesi, Hour Mohamed, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Abdellah El Mekki, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Benelhadj Saadia, Hamzah Alsayadi, Walid Al-Dhabyani, Sara Shatnawi, Yasir Ech-chammakhy, Amal Makouar, Yousra Berrachedi, Mustafa Jarrar, Shady Shehata, Ismail Berrada, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
| Challenge: | despite recent advances in speech processing, the majority of world languages and dialects remain uncovered. |
| Approach: | They propose to collect and transcribe a new Arabic dataset for eight dialects . they also develop strong baselines exploiting the new dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers eight Arabic dialects, including Algerian, Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, and Yemeni. |
uDistil-Whisper: Label-Free Data Filtering for Knowledge Distillation in Low-Data Regimes (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work on distilling Whisper’s knowledge into small models using pseudo-labels shows promising performance while reducing the size by up to 50%. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that distills Whisper’s knowledge into small models using pseudo-labels and reduces the size by up to 50%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the teacher model by 5-7 WER points and is 25-50% more efficient when scaling the data. |
PolyWER: A Holistic Evaluation Framework for Code-Switched Speech Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for measuring accuracy, such as Word Error Rate (WER), are too strict to address this challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluating speech recognition systems to handle language-mixing by appending annotations to a publicly available Arabic-English code-switched dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates speech recognition systems against human judgement and a publicly available Arabic-English code-switched dataset. |