arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Reading Anxiety or Reading the Label? Comparing Fine-Tuned and Frontier Models for Anxiety Detection on Social Media

The study compares six approaches—frontier commercial models, fine‑tuned smaller models, and conventional classifiers—for detecting anxiety in Reddit posts. It reveals a significant lexical bias: 69.3% of anxiety‑labelled posts contain the word "anxiety" or a variant, allowing models to perform well via keyword matching rather than true language understanding. After removing these terms, the frontier model still leads (F1 = 0.846), but a 110 M‑parameter domain‑adapted encoder achieves a close score (F1 = 0.831) without external API calls, and lexical dependence varies widely across models.

By Cris Huynh, Arlene Pham
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