arXiv AI

Wazobia Eval: A Benchmark for Nigerian Pidgin Emotion Understanding, Sarcasm Detection, and Cultural Reasoning

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

Mawqif-XT: An Arabic Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Target Stance Detection

The paper introduces Mawqif-XT, a new Arabic benchmark dataset comprising 996 manually annotated tweets from three public targets: Women Driving, E-Cars, and Trimester System. Each tweet is labeled for stance, sentiment, and sarcasm following the Mawqif annotation scheme, and the dataset is intended as a held‑out evaluation set to test cross‑target generalization. Baseline results are provided using Arabic and multilingual transformer models as well as zero‑shot large language models, enabling reproducible evaluation alongside the original Mawqif dataset.

By Rasha Albalawi, Nuha Albadi, Hamzah Luqman, Maram Kurdi, Saad Ezzini, Asma Yamani, Ahmed Ashraf
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

E-CONAN (Entailment, CONtradition And Neutral) Benchmarks: Arabic Textual Entailment and Natural Inference Datasets

E-CONAN introduces Arabic textual entailment and natural inference benchmarks comprising two datasets: E-CONAN-2 (2-way RTE) and E-CONAN-3 (3-way NLI). The datasets are built from automatically-translated pairs, human-validated machine translations, hand-crafted pairs from Arabic teaching books, and rumor-containing news headlines. The authors evaluated nine multilingual pretrained models and five large language models on these benchmarks, demonstrating that E-CONAN offers a more diverse and robust assessment than existing datasets like XNLI and ArNLI.

By Khloud AL Jallad, Nada Ghneim, Ghaida Rebdawi
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
Aug 28

Why Current XAI Is Not Enough for Arabic NLP: A Critical Survey of the Explainability Gap

The paper surveys the state of Explainable AI (XAI) in Arabic NLP, highlighting three gaps: a method gap where Arabic XAI relies mainly on limited post‑hoc techniques; a task gap with most work focused on classification tasks and little on generation, retrieval, or dialogue; and a linguistic gap where explanations rarely address Arabic‑specific phenomena such as morphology, dialects, and diglossia. It proposes a taxonomy of tasks, methods, linguistic units, and evaluation practices, and outlines a research agenda for linguistically grounded Arabic XAI.

By Salima Lamsiyah, Ruslan Mitkov
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

TalkFa: A Unified Benchmark for Farsi Dialogue Generation and Understanding

TalkFa introduces a unified benchmark for Farsi dialogue generation and understanding, comprising three datasets: WIKI‑FADIAL (4.2K Wikipedia‑grounded dialogues), DAILYDIALOG‑FA (6.6K dialogues with dialogue‑act and emotion annotations), and PLAYDIAL‑FA (2.1K theatrical dialogues with sentiment labels). All dialogues are curated through multi‑stage review by native speakers, ensuring high quality. Experiments show that LoRA fine‑tuning improves generation performance with less data, while specific models excel on classification tasks, and human evaluation confirms the benchmark’s reliability.

By Neda Jamshidi, Kamyar Zeinalipour, Fahimeh Akbari, Monica Bianchini, Marco Maggini, Marco Gori
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

AHA-Memes: A Fine-Grained Multimodal Benchmark for Understanding Hate in Arabic Memes

Hateful memes are a growing form of multimodal online harm, where hostile intent is often conveyed through the joint interpretation of images, text, cultural references, and implicit targets. While hateful meme detection has advanced in high-resource languages, Arabic remains underexplored, with existing meme resources focusing mainly on propaganda or coarse harmful-content labels.

arXiv AI
Oct 1

BARRAC: Adaptation of an English Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Approach for Classification Tasks in Arabic Dialects

The paper introduces BARRAC, a method that adapts an English aspect‑based sentiment analysis framework for Arabic dialect classification tasks. It replaces English consumer‑review attribute pools with Arabic linguistic markers for sentiment, sarcasm, and dialect identification, and swaps noisy self‑training for a two‑stage training process. Evaluated on five Arabic dialect datasets, BARRAC achieves a mean macro‑F1 of 63.93%, surpassing the best few‑label state‑of‑the‑art by 3% and outperforming GPT‑4o on four of the five tasks, while error analysis highlights remaining challenges.

By Ali Almutairi, Gelareh Mohammadi, Imran Razzak, Aditya Joshi