The OASIS Dataset

What’s inside

OASIS pairs each image with a question and an open-ended answer, in both spoken and written form. The data was collected across 18 countries in the MENA region and spans everyday and cultural life. Questions come in English, Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Levantine Arabic, and every question is recorded as audio as well as text.

• 18countries covered
• 9topic categories
• 31sub-categories
• 4language varieties

Sample record image · audio · text

question_en

What is the name of the building shown in the image, and what inspired its design?

question_ar

ما اسم المبنى الموضح في الصورة، وما الذي ألهم تصميمه؟

question_audio

the same question, spoken

answer_en

The building is the National Museum of Qatar, and its design is inspired by desert rose formations.

answer_ar

المبنى هو متحف قطر الوطني، وتصميمه مستوحى من تشكيلات الورود الصحراوية.

An example record: the same question is asked as audio and as text, in English and Arabic varieties, and the target is a short open-ended answer. Photo: Msarg77, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Getting the data

The shared-task data is hosted on Hugging Face and is drawn from OASIS, or created with the same framework. A sample set is available now so you can preview the format; the training and development data follow on the schedule in the timeline.

License

The shared-task dataset is planned for release under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license: free for non-commercial research use, with attribution and share-alike.

Citation

OASIS is described in the paper arXiv:2510.06371. If you use the dataset, please cite:

@article{alam2025everydaymmqa,
  title = {{OASIS}: A Multilingual and Multimodal Dataset for Culturally Grounded Spoken Visual QA},
  author = {Alam, Firoj and Shahroor, Ali Ezzat and Hasan, Md. Arid and Ali, Zien Sheikh and Bhatti, Hunzalah Hassan and Kmainasi, Mohamed Bayan and Chowdhury, Shammur Absar and Mousi, Basel and Dalvi, Fahim and Durrani, Nadir and Milic-Frayling, Natasa},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.06371},
  year = {2025},
}