arXiv Computation and Language

Current state of LLMs for Arabic dialectal machine translation

This study evaluates large language models (LLMs) for English‑to‑dialectal Arabic machine translation using the MADAR dataset across 16 Arabic dialects, covering both translation directions. It compares specialized Arabic models (Jais, Nile), multilingual models (Gemma, Command‑R, Mistral, Aya), and commercial APIs (GPT‑4.1) with multiple metrics—BLEU, CHRF, COMET, GEMBA—and a small manual assessment. The authors also examine LLMs’ ability to classify dialects and discuss challenges in automatic MT evaluation for Arabic dialects, noting potential training data contamination.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

AlexandriaX 2026: The First Shared Task on Dialectal Arabic Machine Translation

arXiv:2609.22796v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dialectal Arabic machine translation (MT) remains challenging despite recent progress in Arabic language technologies, particularly because effective t...

By Abdellah El Mekki, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Samar M. Magdy, Saad Ezzini, Mo El-Haj, Mustafa Jarrar, Zaid Alyafeai, Bernard Ghanem, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Benchmarking Arabic--Russian Machine Translation: A Comparison of Fine-tuned NMT and Few-shot LLMs under Rich Morphology and Low Lexical Overlap

The study evaluates Arabic–Russian machine translation by comparing seven fine‑tuned neural machine translation (NMT) models with four few‑shot large language models (LLMs) on a new 15.47 million‑pair corpus split into 20k/5k/5k. Fine‑tuned NLLB‑1.3B achieves the best performance (BLEU 16.3, COMET 0.738), while the best few‑shot LLM, Aya‑Expanse 8B, scores only BLEU 1.7 on 500 sentences. Error analysis shows that low lexical overlap between Arabic and Russian is the main source of failures, and statistical tests confirm significant performance gaps between most models.

By Mullosharaf K. Arabov
arXiv AI
Aug 17

Jais 2: A Family of Arabic-Centric Open Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 13580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jais 2 is a family of Arabic-centric large language models developed jointly by MBZUAI, Cerebras, and Inception, designed to advance Arabic-centric language modeling, with strong performance across the Arabic and culturally grounded benchmarks evaluated in this report.

By Mohamed Anwar, Abed Alhakim Freihat, George Ibrahim, Mostafa Awad, Abdelrahman Sadallah, Gurpreet Gosal, Gokulakrishnan Ramakrishnan, Sarath Chandran, Biswajit Mishra, Rituraj Joshi, Ahmed Frikha, Etienne Goffinet, Abhishek Maiti, Ali El Filali, Sarah AlBarri, Samujjwal Ghosh, Rahul Pal, Parvez Mullah, Awantika Shukla, Sajid siddiki, Samta Kamboj, Onkar Pandit, Sunil Kumar Sahu, AbdelRahman Elbadawy, Amr Mohamed, Ahmad Chamma, Evan Dufraisse, Abdelaziz Bounhar, Dani Bouch, Hadi Abdine, Guokan Shang, Fajri Koto, Yuxia Wang, Zhuohan Xie, Ali Mekky, Rania Elbadry, Sarfraz Ahmad, Momina Ahsan, Omar El Herraoui, Daniil Orel, Hasan Iqbal, Kareem Elzeky, Mervat Abassy, Kareem Elozeiri, Saadeldine Eletter, Farah Atif, Nurdaulet Mukhituly, Haonan Li, Xudong Han, Aaryamonvikram Singh, Zainul Abedien Ahmed Quraishi, Neha Sengupta, Larry Murray, Avraham Sheinin, Joel Hestness, Natalia Vassilieva, Hector Xuguang Ren, Zhengzhong Liu, Michalis Vazirgiannis, Preslav Nakov
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Last Translation Benchmark

The paper introduces the Last Translation Benchmark (LTB), a live dataset of human-authored and peer‑reviewed examples—including texts, images, audio, and videos—that are designed to break current state‑of‑the‑art machine translation models. Each example is accompanied by handcrafted verification rules that specify concrete failure cases, providing a reliable and actionable evaluation method. The benchmark aims to overcome the limitations of existing automatic metrics and gold human evaluations, which often lack reproducibility, objectivity, and scalability.

By Vil\'em Zouhar, Niyati Bafna, Mukund Choudhary, Maike Z\"ufle, Sara Rajaee, Pinzhen Chen, Jannis Vamvas, Sara Papi, Ona de Gibert, Bhavitvya Malik, Eliya Habba, Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis, Patr\'icia Schmidtov\'a, Michelle Wastl, Sheriff Issaka, Leshem Choshen, Stella Biderman, Antonis Anastasopoulos, Jan Niehues, Rico Sennrich, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ond\v{r}ej Bojar, Kenton Murray, J\"org Tiedemann, Alham Fikri Aji, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz, Alexandra Birch, Sowmya Vajjala, Chalamalasetti Kranti, Cristina Espa\~na-Bonet, Nobin Sarwar, David Kacz\'er, Shunta Asano, Malik Marmonier, Daban Q. Jaff, Vaisakhi Mishra, Hend Al- Khalifa, Gabriele Sarti, Sourajit Saha, Nils Rehlinger, Juan Daniel Cuervo Villa, Jonathan Tonglet, Saugata Purkayastha, Dominik Mach\'a\v{c}ek, Jagannathan Ramanujam, Heejin Do, Zuzana Nadova, Fred Philippy, Fabian Retkowski, Maria Lymperaiou, Silvia Casola, Hanna Yukhymenko, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Sangwon Ryu, Andr\'es Jerez, Ron Keinan, Shuaib Shuaib Yusuf, Avantica Vempati, Maria Carmen Staiano, Sukannya Purkayastha, Adrian Cosma, Vitalii Babenko, Erivan Inan, Aviral Nigam, Wafa Aissa, Fatima Haouari, Venkata Prasanth Kumar Gummadi, Mehdi Jafarzadeh, Valentin Scourneau, Lukas Edman, Kaiser Sun, Shaomu Tan, Mohammad Sadegh Gholizadeh, Johannes-Rudolf David, Dipankar Srirag, Javier Garc\'ia Gilabert, Ruta Binkyte, Manar Ali, Ana-Maria Bucur, Sabry E. Farrag, Youssef Saber, Yihong Liu, Jean Maillard, Cojocaru Nicoleta, Xiaochuang Yuan, Sina Ahmadi, Philipp Mondorf, Kaustubh Dhole, Roman Wixinger, Shenbin Qian, Manuel Tuor, Sergey Troshin, Jonathan Yahav, Fida Mohammad Thoker, Amir Arsalan Rezapour, Lance Calvin Lim Gamboa, Manon Reusens, K\"atriin Kukk, Koel Dutta Chowdhury, Giuseppe Gallipoli, Christian Hoang, Shaswati Saha, Seth Aycock, Jan Koco\'n, Bo Chen, Linh Vu, Vatsal Venkatkrishna, Arafat Ahsan, Luan Thanh Nguyen, Hassan Soliman, Daryna Dementieva, Theresia Veronika Rampisela, Ngoc Quynh Tram Do, Marius Huber, Kazuki Egashira, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Vladislav Poritski, Mike Zhang, Deep Shah, Paul Gavrikov, Luis Frentzen Salim, David Africa, R. Damanhuri, Bello Umar Bello, Anumit Garg, Gengyu Rao, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Kamile Dementaviciute, Andrianos Michail, L D M S Sai Teja, Dawei Zhu, Yi Fan, Wei Liu, Farhan Farsi, Elias Herranen, Sankalan Pal Chowdhury, Karen Sanchez, Farzad Shami, Ashok Urlana, Zimu Wang, Tomasz Limisiewicz, Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Marii Ojastu, Hongbin Na, Emilian Radoi, Chenyi Zhao, Carlos Hinojosa, Andrea Gregor de Varda, Zaid Alyafeai, Reem Alzahrani, Nehal Kathrotia, Alex Fl\"uckiger, Ulysses Sekai Tully Carr, Jimson Paulo Layacan, Guy Kaplan, Ritwik Tiwari, Rishit Dagli, Oksana Volchek, Isaac R Caswell, Bowen Yi, Blanka K\"ov\'er, Amir Hossein Yari, Aicha Chorana, Zhengxiang Wang, Selja Ker\"anen, Samuel Simko, Joy Olusanya, Jenny Chim, Enzo Doyen, Vivek Harsha Lakkamaneni, Sophia Conrad, Pouya Sadeghi, Panayiotis Panayiotou, Luis Lara, Jannatul Nayem, Eran Yahav, Debanshu Das, Antonia Karamolegkou, Anmol Goel, Aishik Mandal, Tommaso Cerruti, Raoyuan Zhao, Mykola Haltiuk, Thura Aung, Naser Almousa, Amir Hossein Kargaran, Rachel Bawden, Qiaoyuan Zheng, Mateusz Lango, Beni Egressy, Fidel Rodr\'iguez Vel\'asquez, Natchapon Jongwiriyanurak, Minh Ngoc Do, Marco Gaido, Lena Libon, Dzmitry Kuzmin, Badal Nyalang, Antoine Taroni, Andrei Niculae, Abdulaziz Nura Kani, Rushikesh Zawar, Marek \v{S}uppa, Beatrice Savoldi, Andreas Simons, Rayyan Merchant, Ilai Yaron Levy, Francesco Pinto, Ziyi Yang, Yolanda Xavier, Samuel Frontull, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Kenneth Enevoldsen, Harris Abdul Majid, Francesca Padovani, Tim Graf, Tatiana Bielakova, Sharifa Djurabaeva, Shaoxiong Ji, Raia Abu Ahmad, Pavel Stepachev, Jirui Qi, Ayush Sunil Munot, Alireza Pakniat, Ayla Rigouts Terryn, Yuxing Lu, Yurii Paniv, Xiyan Fu, Tosin Adewumi, Sunisth Kumar, St\'ephane J. P. S. Thunus, Shree Harsha Bokkahalli Satish, Shayan Bali, Prakhar Gupta, Papa Abdou Karim Karou Diallo, Matija Akrap, Marko Culjak, Krist\'yna Onderkov\'a, Joseph Attieh, Esrael Teferi Tensay, Elisabeth Fittschen, Beno\^it Sagot, Jingwei Ni, Yu Fan
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

Large Language Models for Machine Translation Quality Annotation: Humans and Models Are Both Challenged

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being tested as a cost‑effective alternative to human judgment for evaluating machine translation (MT). This study compares LLM agreement with human annotators on two MT quality schemes—Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and Error Span Annotation (ESA)—across 70 language pairs and public WMT23/25 data. Results show that while LLMs sometimes match or exceed human agreement, performance varies widely by scheme, language, and domain, and remains unreliable in many settings. The work also identifies specific challenges for both humans (e.g., fine‑grained MQM, low‑resource languages) and LLMs (e.g., minor errors, wrong language variants, span annotation).

By Hala Almaghout, Christian Federmann, Qin Gao
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

GigaSpeech 3: Scaling Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Recognition with Weakly Labeled Data

GigaSpeech 3 is a new Arabic speech corpus comprising 39,000 hours and 10 million weakly transcribed segments across Algerian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Saudi, and Syrian dialects. It is built from 60 hours of manual transcription per dialect, using self‑supervised labeling models and noisy‑student refinement to produce high‑quality data. The corpus enables dialect‑specific and multi‑dialect speech recognition models that outperform existing third‑party systems, achieving a macro‑average word error rate of 23.86% for dialect‑specific models and 25.51% for a multi‑dialect model.

By Junzhe Liu, Yujie Tu, Yifan Yang, Peng Wang, Haoran Wang, Guodong Lin, Leyan Liao, Chengquan Zhang, Zhifu Gao, Xiangang Li, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Kai Yu, Xie Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 2

EDRAC: Benchmarking Arabic Dialect Reading Comprehension

EDRAC is the first large‑scale benchmark for dialectal Arabic machine reading comprehension and generative question answering, covering five major dialects—Egyptian, Moroccan, Emirati, Syrian, and Saudi. It contains 499 passages from naturally spoken interactions and 4,977 QA pairs produced via a human–LLM collaborative pipeline. The benchmark evaluates Arabic‑centric and multilingual large language models, revealing gaps between semantic answer quality and dialectal fidelity and underscoring limitations of current evaluation metrics for dialectal Arabic generation.

By Noor Abo Mokh, Kirill Chirkunov, Teresa Lynn, Nizar Habash, Reham Marzouk, Malik H. Altakrori, Younes Samih, Muhammed Abu Odeh, Nour Rabih, Rahaf Alshahrani, Hamad Alshehhi, Hamdan Al-Ali, Muhra Almahri, Besher Hassan, Mohamed Anwar, Abed Alhakim Freihat, Preslav Nakov, Alham Fikri Aji