arXiv Computation and Language By Noor Abo Mokh, Mohamed Adel, Jamila El-Gizuli, Go Inoue, Ahmed Elshabrawy, Nizar Habash

A Parallel Multi-Dialect Arabic Dependency Treebank

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The paper introduces MADARTB, the first large-scale parallel Arabic dependency treebank covering five city dialects—Beirut, Cairo, Doha, Rabat, and Tunis—alongside Modern Standard Arabic. It contains 5,000 sentences annotated with the CATiB dependency scheme and shows that while overall construction profiles are similar across varieties, local syntactic structures often diverge, indicating significant structural variation. A supervised parser achieves 87.5% LAS, outperforming the best LLM setup at 85.7% LAS across all six varieties, and the authors release the annotations and models publicly.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.

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
Jun 12

AfriSUD: A Dependency Treebank Collection for Evaluating Models on African Languages

arXiv:2606. 12708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite their linguistic diversity and global significance, African languages remain underrepresented in research and resources to support NLP.

By Happy Buzaaba, Cheikh Mouhamadou Bamba Dione, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Sylvain Kahane, Kim Gerdes, Bruno Guillaume, Kevin Guan, Aremu Anuoluwapo, Naome A. Etori, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Utitofon Inyang, Peter Nabende, David Sabiiti Bamutura, Andiswa Bukula, Chinedu Uchechukwu, Rooweither Mabuya, Idris Akinade, Christiane Fellbaum
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
Oct 19

alkhder at AlexandriaX-2026: Context-Aware English-to-Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation with QLoRA-Fine-Tuned NileChat-3B

The paper reports Alkhder’s submission to Subtask 1 of the AlexandriaX-2026 shared task, translating English dialogue turns into thirteen Arabic dialects. The team fine‑tuned NileChat‑3B‑Base with QLoRA on the Alexandria parallel dialogue corpus, training a single set of adapter weights for all dialects. Each translation is conditioned on target country, dialect, domain, participant roles, speaker‑addressee gender direction, and preceding dialogue context, and the model is run autoregressively using its own previous outputs as context. In the constrained track, training takes about one hour and inference on the private test set takes under two hours, achieving a country‑macro‑averaged spBLEU of 20.36 and chrF++ of 36.64 on both tracks.

By Hasan Alkhder, Maher Pasa, Maria Hanini, Amro Najjar, Ahmet Zengin