ALBAYZIN EVALUATION CHALLENGE 2026

The “ALBAYZIN 2026 Speech Technologies for COSER: A Spanish Rural Corpus (Speech-COSER)” challenge is supported by the Spanish Thematic Network on Speech Technology (RTTH) and is organized by Universidad San Pablo CEU and AUDIAS from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The challenge integrates in the IberSPEECH 2026 conference that will be held in Madrid, Spain from 18th to 20th November 2026.

Challenge and database description

The challenge addresses several speech technologies on the Spanish speech rural corpus called COSER. This Spanish dataset stands out due to its substantial geographical and dialectal diversity, covering all regions in Spain, and whose speakers belong to an old population in rural areas with low education levels. This is the largest corpus of dialectal European Spanish, with recordings of rural context and senior Spanish speakers. The complexity of this dataset presents a significant challenge for speech technologies. The challenge integrates three different tracks:

• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): This track focuses on automatically transcribing the audio files, for which the sequence of words that appears in each audio file must be provided.
• Speaker Diarization (SD): This track focuses on automatically segmenting the audio files according to speaker turns, for which timestamps and speaker assignment to segments must be provided. Even if the identity of the speakers and number of speakers is unknown, the output should group segments of the same speaker under the same speaker label.
• Spoken Term Detection (STD): This track aims to detecting a list of terms within the audio files. This list is assumed to be unknown when processing the audio. A set of occurrences for each term detected in the audio files must be generated, along with their timestamps and scores as output.

The evaluation will be performed in a continuous evaluation method, with a publicly available leaderboard where participants will be able to submit their scores for each of the tracks and check their performance with respect to other participants. This leaderboard will be frozen by the deadline evaluation submission and will be reopened for post-evaluation period.