arXiv Computation and Language

YallaMorph: A Benchmark for Evaluating Arabic Morphological Generation in Large Language Models

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Arabic Morphosyntactic Tagging and Dependency Parsing with Large Language Models

The paper evaluates large language models (LLMs) on Arabic morphosyntactic tagging and dependency parsing, a challenging task due to rich morphology and orthographic ambiguity. It compares zero‑shot prompting with retrieval‑based in‑context learning across pre‑tokenized, raw‑text, and cascaded settings, finding that relevant demonstrations significantly boost performance. The best LLMs nearly match supervised systems but need extensive annotated data for demonstrations and high computational resources. All code and data are publicly released.

By Mohamed Adel, Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Nuha-Speech: Building General-Purpose Arabic Speech-LLMs

Nuha‑Speech is a new initiative aimed at creating general‑purpose Arabic speech‑large language models (speech‑LLMs). It includes the construction of a large Arabic Speech Question‑Answering corpus with over 1.5 million samples for instruction tuning, supervised fine‑tuning of Qwen‑Omni model variants at various scales, and a systematic evaluation framework with diverse tasks and tailored metrics. The project seeks to establish foundational infrastructure for Arabic speech‑LLMs amid limited Arabic speech resources.

By Yingzhi Wang, Reem Alhazzani, Muhammad Alqurishi
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 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 Computation and Language
Sep 1

Arabic Sentence Segmentation Across Genres and Punctuation Conditions

The paper introduces AraSEG, a new Arabic sentence segmentation corpus covering eight genres and diverse punctuation and document structures. Experiments using AraSEG evaluate large language models, lightweight encoders, and dependency parser-based models, revealing that lightweight encoders and parser-based models outperform LLMs under the most challenging conditions. The study also shows that increasing training data size and genre diversity eventually saturates performance, that cross‑genre generalization remains difficult, and that accurate sentence segmentation significantly improves downstream dependency parsing.

By Mohammed Elkholy, Khalid N. Elmadani, Nizar Habash, Bashar Alhafni
arXiv AI
Aug 20

SuTRA : Structurally-Unified Tokenization with Root Awareness

SuTRA (Structurally-Unified Tokenization with Root Awareness) is a morphology-aware tokenization algorithm designed to address the problem of Morphological Shattering in morphologically rich Indic languages. It preserves the indivisibility of aksharas—complex orthographic syllables—by penalizing merges that cross morphological boundaries, thereby reducing over-fragmentation of words. The authors also release a new morphological segmentation dataset for Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati, and demonstrate that SuTRA improves morphological alignment by up to 14.7% and semantic recoverability by 34% over BPE, leading to an average machine translation gain of +8.08 chrF2.

By Vaibhav Rathore, Siddhant Gole, Dadhichi Telwadkar, Rooshil Bhatia, Maulik Ruparel, Siddharth Surekha, Neha Bhargava
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

Does Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Dominate Arabic Dialects in LLMs? A Representation-Level Analysis

The study investigates whether Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) dominates internal representations in large language models (LLMs) when generating Arabic, even if prompted with dialectal forms. By extending a language-dominance framework to 26 Arabic varieties, the authors find no evidence that MSA serves as a dominant internal representation; instead, dialect representations are densely overlapping, with mutual information dropping sharply compared to more distinct languages. The strongest separability effects vary across layers and architectures, indicating that generation bias toward MSA does not necessarily reflect internal representational dominance.

By Abdu Sallouh, Nicholas Popovi\v{c}, Michael F\"{a}rber