TTLab submitted a system for the AlexandriaX-2026 Subtask 3 on Arabic machine‑translation error‑span detection and classification. The approach treats the task as token‑level classification over surface forms, using focal loss with class weighting and dialect‑specific decoding thresholds to address label imbalance. MARBERTv2, among six Arabic pre‑trained encoders, achieved the best performance, ranking third overall, though classification of rare error types remains difficult, indicating a need for data augmentation.
arXiv:2608.01291v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present ArabicDialectSafety, a human-curated Arabic safety dataset of 25,071 prompts covering six Arabic varieties: Modern Standard Arabic, Syri...
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...
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.
arXiv:2608.29589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) safety guardrails fail to generalize equitably to non-standard dialects. Evaluating 23,080 paired prompts across five English diale...
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.
AfriSwitch is a 61.36‑hour, human‑transcribed benchmark of in‑the‑wild code‑switched speech covering 16 African languages and varieties, annotated with switch‑level English span tags, per‑utterance Code‑Mixing Index (CMI), and switch‑point counts. The corpus reveals that code‑switching behaviour varies widely across languages, with no single metric fully capturing how code‑switched a language is. Benchmarking five open and commercial multilingual ASR systems in a zero‑shot setting shows high word error rates, with the best system averaging 35.93% WER and none dropping below 24% on any language, indicating that Africa‑targeted training rather than model scale or nominal language coverage best predicts performance.
The paper introduces Latent Space Refusal Anchoring (LSR‑Anchoring), a training‑free technique that extracts a refusal direction from English prompts and applies it to the residual stream of instruction‑tuned models at inference time. The primary variant, Mean‑Activation Steering (MAS), works across several architectures (Llama‑3‑8B, Llama‑3.1‑70B, Mistral‑7B‑Instruct, Qwen2.5‑7B), restoring safety for low‑resource African languages with minimal performance loss, while a refined SAE‑Derived Steering (SDS) further reduces KL divergence without degrading legitimate prompt performance. The method shows positive transfer for Yoruba, Igbo, Igala, and Hausa, but fails for Arabic, suggesting a geometric mismatch rather than a data scarcity issue.
Manacá-1B is a 1.72‑billion‑parameter, open decoder‑only language model trained from scratch for Brazilian Portuguese, released with a fully containerized, reproducible training pipeline and complete logs. The authors evaluate it against nine open baselines on four Portuguese benchmarks, reporting standard errors and paired significance tests, and find that Manacá-1B outperforms smaller models on LAMBADA‑PT while remaining competitive on commonsense completion. They also uncover a tokenizer‑related evaluation pitfall that can drastically lower accuracy and provide a simple fix, releasing all code, logs, and corrected tokenizer for full reproducibility.
ArGuard is a shared task that evaluates harmful content detection in Arabic memes and LLM prompts, featuring two tracks: Track A for multimodal hate detection in memes and Track B for harmful prompt detection in Arabic LLM safety evaluation. Fifty‑eight teams registered, 35 reached the final evaluation, and 27 submitted system‑description papers, with participants experimenting with models such as AraBERT, Jais, and Qwen3‑VL. The top systems achieved macro‑F1 scores of 0.823 on A1, 0.419 on A2, 0.984 on B1, and 0.790 on B2, with fine‑grained meme classification in A2 proving the most challenging due to sparse labels and distribution shifts.
arXiv:2608.22872v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-based applications pass spoken queries through automatic speech recognition (ASR) before any retrieval module, so ASR errors enter the pipeline...
The paper introduces Iterative MBR Distillation for Error Span Detection (ESD) in machine translation, a self‑evolution framework that replaces human annotations with pseudo‑labels generated by a large language model. By iteratively applying Minimum Bayes Risk decoding, the method produces high‑quality error spans without costly human effort. Experiments on WMT Metrics Shared Task datasets show that models trained solely on these pseudo‑labels outperform both unadapted baselines and supervised models trained on human data at system and span levels, while keeping sentence‑level performance competitive.
NADI 2026 is the seventh edition of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification shared task series and the second focused on multidialectal Arabic speech processing. It includes five main tasks—Automatic Speech Recognition, Spoken Dialect Identification, Text-to-Speech, Spoken Language Translation, and Spoken Language Understanding—along with eight subtasks that test realistic scenarios such as low‑bandwidth, mixed dialects, code‑switching, out‑of‑domain, and zero‑shot settings. The event attracted 21 teams from at least 13 countries, with 48 test‑phase submissions and 14 system‑description papers, and the results highlight out‑of‑domain generalization as a major bottleneck while showcasing the strengths of Arabic‑specialized speech models, multimodal dialect identification, and ensemble methods.