license: cc-by-4.0
language:
- ar
multilinguality:
- monolingual
pretty_name: Ara-Best-RQ Dataset
size_categories:
- 1M<n<10M
Ara-Best-RQ Dataset
Dataset Summary
This dataset provides metadata only for a dialectal Arabic speech corpus constructed from publicly available YouTube videos.
It consists exclusively of YouTube video identifiers and audio segment boundaries (start/end timestamps) designed for self-supervised speech representation learning.
No audio or video content is distributed as part of this dataset.
Dataset Statistics
- Total spoken duration: 5,639 h 04 min 27 s
- Number of videos: 41,826
- Number of speech segments: 3,860,419
Supported Tasks
- Self-supervised speech representation learning
- Speech segmentation
- Arabic speech and dialect research
Languages
- Arabic (
ar)
Dataset Structure
Each entry includes:
- A YouTube video identifier
- Segment start time (seconds)
- Segment end time (seconds)
Users are expected to retrieve the referenced media themselves and extract the corresponding audio segments.
Licensing Information
Metadata License
All metadata (video identifiers and segment boundaries) is released under:
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
This license applies only to the metadata provided in this dataset.
Referenced Media
The referenced audio/video content:
- Is not distributed
- Remains hosted on YouTube
- Is subject to the original license selected by the content uploader
Users are responsible for ensuring compliance with the original content licenses and YouTube’s Terms of Service.
Citation
If you use this dataset, please cite the following paper:
Ara-Best-RQ: Multi Dialectal Arabic SSL
Haroun Elleuch, Ryan Whetten, Salima Mdhaffar, Yannick Estève, Fethi Bougares
Accepted at ICASSP 2026
A BibTeX entry will be provided once the proceedings are published.
Ethical Considerations
- This dataset references only publicly available content
- No personally identifying information is added or inferred
- No attempt is made to identify speakers
Limitations
- Some referenced videos may become unavailable over time
- Audio quality and recording conditions vary
- Licensing information for individual videos is not exhaustively archived
Contact
For questions, corrections, or takedown requests, please contact the dataset maintainer via the Hugging Face repository.