# SD-QA: Spoken Dialectal Question Answering for the Real World

Source: [SD-QA: Spoken Dialectal Question Answering for the Real World](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6add1e209131cea2ae62>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T23:35:16.571Z

Authors: Fahim Faisal, Sharlina Keshava, Md Mahfuz ibn Alam, Antonios Anastasopoulos

Published: 2021-09-24T16:54:27.000Z

## Abstract

Question answering (QA) systems are now available through numerous commercial applications for a wide variety of domains, serving millions of users that interact with them via speech interfaces. However, current benchmarks in QA research do not account for the errors that speech recognition models might introduce, nor do they consider the language variations (dialects) of the users. To address this gap, we augment an existing QA dataset to construct a multi-dialect, spoken QA benchmark on five languages (Arabic, Bengali, English, Kiswahili, Korean) with more than 68k audio prompts in 24 dialects from 255 speakers. We provide baseline results showcasing the real-world performance of QA systems and analyze the effect of language variety and other sensitive speaker attributes on downstream performance. Last, we study the fairness of the ASR and QA models with respect to the underlying user populations. The dataset, model outputs, and code for reproducing all our experiments are available: https://github.com/ffaisal93/SD-QA.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.12072>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.12072.pdf>)