arXiv AI
Sep 1

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.

By Ghassan Al-Sumaidaee, Sajjad Abdoli, Ahmed Rashad, Maxim Legg
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
Sep 4

Translation as a Decision Space: A Multi-Agent Perspective on Low-Resource Dialect Generation

The paper proposes treating translation as a structured decision space explored by multiple autonomous agents, rather than producing a single output. Using Turkish–Syrian Arabic dialogue, three agents—zero‑shot, dialect‑stabilized, and pivot translation—are compared on 5,000 sentences, with stabilization nearly doubling dialect marker usage and reducing structural instability. The study introduces an interpretability framework that quantifies decision flexibility through dialect marker frequency, lexical proximity, and structural variance.

By Hasan Alkhder, Mohammad Abboush, Igor Tchappi, Ahmet Zengin, Amro Najjar