arXiv AI

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

SinLlama -- A Large Language Model for Sinhala

The paper introduces SinLlama, the first decoder‑based open‑source large language model with explicit support for Sinhala. By extending Llama‑3‑8B, adding Sinhala‑specific tokenizer vocabulary, and performing continual pre‑training on a cleaned 10‑million‑token Sinhala corpus, the authors created a model that surpasses both the base and instruction‑fine‑tuned variants of Llama‑3‑8B on three text classification tasks. This work addresses the underrepresentation of low‑resource languages in open‑source LLMs.

By H. W. K. Aravinda, Rashad Sirajudeen, Samith Karunathilake, Nisansa de Silva, Surangika Ranathunga, Rishemjit Kaur