Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: We present NakbaEcho, a large-scale dataset derived from Palestinian testimonies about the 1948 Nakba.The resource is constructed from transcribing over 2,180 hours of recorded interviews gathered through the Palestine Remembered Oral History index and linked to multiple repositories, including the Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) and YouTube-hosted interviews.We harmonize interview-level metadata and generate timestamp-aligned transcripts from the original Arabic recordings using an automatic transcription pipeline configured for Palestinian Arabic.The dataset includes speaker-labeled segments and auxiliary annotations designed to support downstream research in Arabic speech processing, natural language processing, digital humanities, and oral-history analysis.We further provide an empirical evaluation of transcription quality and descriptive analyses of geographic coverage, narrator demographics, and linguistic patterns across the corpus.NakbaEcho contributes a structured and extensible computational resource for studying Palestinian oral testimony while expanding the availability of dialectal Arabic materials for speech, text, and social research, supporting reproducibility, benchmarking, and future cross-lingual and multimodal research directions.
Institutions: University of Edinburgh, University of Manitoba
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166503291