arXiv:2609.23955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Previous work on Egyptian Arabic in NLP has focused largely on the prestigious Cairene Egyptian Arabic (CEA) dialect, resulting in a lack of representa...
The paper investigates how Arabic dialects are represented in large language models and whether they can be steered at inference time. By analyzing neuron-level sparsity and vector steering, the authors find that only a small fraction of neurons encode dialect-specific features, while distributed activation directions are more effective for steering. Vector steering can induce dialectal output from both dialectal and MSA prompts, whereas neuron steering works only when the prompt is already dialectal.
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...
arXiv:2609.10395v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper describes the Rosetta system for Subtask 1 (Context-Aware English-to-Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation) of the AlexandriaX shared task,...
Dialectal variation remains a major challenge for multilingual language models. Perturbation-based continued pre-training (CPT) has emerged as a promising approach to improving robustness, yet existing work largely evaluates individual perturbation strategies in isolation and provides limited insight into why they work.
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.
arXiv:2606. 16753v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) become embedded in everyday communication, capturing regional linguistic variation is essential for reliable and equitable language use.
arXiv:2605. 02608v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformer-based models achieve state-of-the-art dependency parsing for high-resource languages, yet their advantage over simpler architectures in low-resource settings remains poorly understood.
The paper introduces a rubric-based benchmark to evaluate Saudi Arabic dialect and cultural competence in large language models. It comprises 31 expert-authored prompts covering idiomatic, pragmatic, lexical, and culturally embedded aspects, each paired with an expert-established ground truth. Four state-of-the-art models were scored, revealing that none exceeded 55% accuracy and that ambiguous framing was the most common error type.
The study investigates why language models exhibit systematic performance gaps across English dialects, a phenomenon termed the "dialect tax." Using parallel dialect corpora that preserve meaning while altering surface form, the authors confirm that models treat Standard American English and dialectal texts as semantically equivalent, yet find representational disparities that persist through tokenization, pre‑training, post‑training, and inference. Even a character‑level tokenizer does not eliminate input/output asymmetries or accuracy gaps, and dialect pairs produce more divergent gradient updates than unrelated Standard texts, indicating that dialectal content is harder for models to learn.
arXiv:2605.16364v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) voice assistants are commonly built as cascaded Automatic Speech recognition (ASR) to LLM systems, where recogni...