oist/algerian-code-switched-asr-eval

Dataset Description

This dataset contains 335 manually transcribed audio segments (approximately 30 minutes total) extracted from Algerian political and misinformation-related social-media videos, collected from public interviews on TikTok and YouTube in September 2025. It was built as the evaluation set for What WER Hides: A Closer Look at Algerian Code-Switched ASR, and is intended for benchmarking automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems on Algerian dialectal and code-switched speech.

Each segment is labelled with its language variety:

Variety	Code	Segments	Duration (min)
Algerian dialect	DI	74	5.5
Mixed MSA and dialect	MSA-DI	127	12.3
Modern Standard Arabic	MSA	83	4.6
Arabic-French code-switching	CS	19	4.7
French	FR	32	2.6
Total		335	29.7

Reference transcriptions were produced by a native speaker of Algerian Arabic fluent in French, familiar with the code-switching phenomena and the downstream task. Dialectal Arabic was written as heard, with no normalising standard; Modern Standard Arabic followed standard Arabic orthography; French was kept in Latin script following standard French orthography.

The dataset is derived from the same source material as the BOUTEF corpus and is released under comparable controlled access conditions (see LICENSE), given that speakers may be identifiable from the audio.

Fields

• audio: the audio segment (16kHz mono WAV)
• id: segment identifier
• type: language variety code (DI, MSA-DI, MSA, CS, FR)
• video: source video identifier, to group segments from the same recording
• transcription: normalised reference transcription (ref_norm)

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@inproceedings{istaiteh2026hides,
  title={What WER Hides: A Closer Look at Algerian Code-Switched ASR},
  author={Istaiteh, Othman and Toughrai, Yassine and Sma{\"\i}li, Kamel and Mdhaffar, Salima and Langlois, David and Est{\`e}ve, Yannick},
  booktitle={The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2026) Co-located with EMNLP 2026},
  year={2026}
}