arXiv AI

Beyond Fluency: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating Saudi Dialect and Cultural Competence in Large Language Models

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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22

HalluTruthQA: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Hallucination Detection, Localization, and Explanation in Arabic Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent Arabic answers, yet factual errors remain difficult to detect, localize, explain, and verify. Existing hallucination benchmarks often provide response-level labels, with limited support for identifying the exact erroneous content, explaining why it is incorrect, or selecting the correct factual answer.

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 AI
Sep 24

Beyond Poetry: Can Large Language Models Generate Classical Arabic Maqamat?

arXiv:2609. 28245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in creative text generation, yet their ability to produce culturally grounded and stylistically constrained literary forms remains underexplored.

By AbdulRahman A. Morsy (Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, George Washington University, Washington DC, United States), Aya Zirikly (Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, George Washington University, Washington DC, United States, Center for Speech and Language Processing, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD, United States)
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

ARAFA: An LLM-Generated Arabic Fact-Checking Dataset

A new large-scale Arabic fact‑checking dataset called Arafa has been created using an automated pipeline that generates claims from Arabic Wikipedia, mutates them into counterfactuals, and validates them against supporting or refuting evidence. The dataset contains 181,976 claim‑evidence pairs labeled as supported, refuted, or not enough information, and human evaluation shows high inter‑annotator agreement and strong validation accuracy. Fine‑tuned transformer models on Arafa achieve a Macro F1‑score of 77%, demonstrating its usefulness for Arabic fact‑checking tasks.

By Christophe Khalil, Shady Elbassuoni, Rida Assaf
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
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Computational Orientalism: Measuring Structural Discourse Bias in Large Language Models Using the Middle East Cultural Sensitivity Score (MECSS)

The paper introduces the Middle East Cultural Sensitivity Score (MECSS) to quantify Orientalist bias in large language models, converting Said’s seven Orientalist operations into measurable dimensions. Using 280 conversations, it finds that GPT‑4 and Falcon3‑7B‑Instruct systematically reproduce Orientalist patterns, with Falcon scoring higher despite being regionally built. The study highlights that geographic origin alone does not mitigate bias and identifies a new failure mode, "Said‑washing," present in 87.9% of GPT‑4 interactions.

By Maha Shahid
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 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