# AI Elites at NADI 2026 Shared Task: Selecting on Out-of-Domain Accuracy for Cross-Domain Spoken Arabic Dialect Identification

> Source: <https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.10/>
> Published: 2026-10-23 00:00:00+00:00

##### Abstract

We describe our submission to NADI-2026 Subtask 2, country-level spoken Arabic dialect identification on a blind test set from undisclosed sources. Because the target domain is unknown at development time, we select on out-of-domain accuracy rather than in-domain validation accuracy at every decision point, comparing three backbones under a common pooling-plus-linear head and training the selected Arabic ASR encoder on ADI20-micro mixed with Casablanca. The system reaches 91.54% in-domain, 73.10% on the held-out MADIS-5 corpus (scored five-way), and 52.51% on the blind test set (C
<sub>avg</sub>0.11), placing fourth. The criterion helped, choosing an encoder that in-domain accuracy would have rejected by 32 points on a held-out corpus, a gap more than twenty times our measured seed variation, but it was not sufficient: of the 39.03-point in-domain to blind gap, at least 18.44 points are attributable to leaving the training domain. We trace part of the remainder to a corpus that entered the training mixture while still being used for checkpoint selection.

- Anthology ID:
- 2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.10
- Volume:
- [Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks/)
- Month:
- October
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- Budapest, Hungary
- Editors:
- [Muhammad Abdul-Mageed](https://aclanthology.org/people/muhammad-abdul-mageed/) ,[Tamer Elsayed](https://aclanthology.org/people/tamer-elsayed/) ,[Houda Bouamor](https://aclanthology.org/people/houda-bouamor/unverified/) ,[Samhaa El-Beltagy](https://aclanthology.org/people/samhaa-r-el-beltagy/) ,[Hend Al-Khalifa](https://aclanthology.org/people/hend-al-khalifa/) ,[Ahmed Abdelali](https://aclanthology.org/people/ahmed-abdelali/unverified/) ,[AbdelRahim Elmadany](https://aclanthology.org/people/abdelrahim-elmadany/unverified/) ,[Abdellah El Mekki](https://aclanthology.org/people/abdellah-el-mekki/) ,[Kareem Darwish](https://aclanthology.org/people/kareem-darwish/) ,[Sakhar Alkhereyf](https://aclanthology.org/people/sakhar-alkhereyf/) ,[Hamzah Luqman](https://aclanthology.org/people/hamzah-luqman/) ,[Salam Khalifa](https://aclanthology.org/people/salam-khalifa/) ,[Samar Magdy](https://aclanthology.org/people/samar-magdy/unverified/) ,[Zaid Alyafeai](https://aclanthology.org/people/zaid-alyafeai/) ,[Injy Hamed](https://aclanthology.org/people/injy-hamed/unverified/) ,[Wajdi Zaghouani](https://aclanthology.org/people/wajdi-zaghouani/) ,[Imed Zitouni](https://aclanthology.org/people/imed-zitouni/unverified/)
- Venue:
- [ArabicNLP](https://aclanthology.org/venues/arabicnlp/)
- SIG:
- [SIGARAB](https://aclanthology.org/sigs/sigarab/)
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 88–94
- Language:
- URL:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.10/](https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.10/)
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Musab Iskandar, Mohammed Al-Haig, Adel Sameer Alharbi, Khalid Alharbi, and Youssef Mohamed. 2026. [AI Elites at NADI 2026 Shared Task: Selecting on Out-of-Domain Accuracy for Cross-Domain Spoken Arabic Dialect Identification](https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.10/) . In*Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks* , pages 88–94, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- [AI Elites at NADI 2026 Shared Task: Selecting on Out-of-Domain Accuracy for Cross-Domain Spoken Arabic Dialect Identification](https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.10/) (Iskandar et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
- PDF:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.10.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.10.pdf)