arXiv Machine Learning

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

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
2d ago

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
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 Computation and Language
Sep 4

To What Extent Do Large Language Models Understand Bangla Idioms?

The paper introduces the first large‑scale benchmark dataset of Bangla idioms, along with a synthetic multiple‑choice question set for idiom meaning identification. It evaluates recent large language models on three idiom‑related tasks—paraphrasing, idiom span detection, and meaning identification—using zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting. Results show significant variability across models, with Phi‑4‑mini‑instruct best at paraphrasing, Kimi‑K2‑32b‑instruct excelling at span detection, and Gemini‑2.5‑flash leading in meaning identification.

By Mousumi Akter, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Nurul Labib Sayeedi, Swakkhar Shatabda
arXiv AI
Aug 25

ProBel: Propaganda Detection with Techniques, Spans, and Explanations

ProBel is a bilingual Arabic and English resource for propaganda detection that aligns binary labels, multi-label annotations for 23 propaganda techniques grouped into six categories, technique-labeled spans, and reference explanations for news sentences. The dataset supports matched binary, coarse-grained, multi-label, and span-level tasks in both languages, and the authors evaluate zero‑shot prompting, task‑specific fine‑tuning, and joint training. A single bilingual multi‑task model achieves the best overall performance, with cross‑task analysis revealing that joint classification preserves binary performance while span‑only training can weaken sentence‑level prediction, and that joint bilingual training yields the most stable results.

By Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Elisa Sartori, Giovanni Da San Martino, Firoj Alam
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Selecting Open-Weight Language Models for Zero-Shot Intent Classification: A Systematic Evaluation of 41 Models

arXiv:2607. 27421v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intent classification is a core component of task-oriented dialogue systems, yet practitioners have limited systematic guidance for selecting deployable open-weight language models under compute, latency, and robustness constraints.

By Parishruthi Ganesh, Gerry Dozier, Cheryl Seals