Related papers: Hala Technical Report: Building Arabic-Centric Ins…

This paper describes the creation, optimization, and assessment of a question-answering (QA) model for a personalized learning assistant that uses BERT transformers customized for the Arabic language. The model was particularly finetuned on…

Open-source large language models (LLMs) still marginalise Moroccan Arabic (Darija), forcing practitioners either to bolt on heavyweight Arabic adapters or to sacrifice the very reasoning skills that make LLMs useful. We show that a…

The performance of large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) depends heavily on the quality and scale of their pre-training datasets. Recent research shows that large multimodal models trained on natural documents…

We present AraLingBench: a fully human annotated benchmark for evaluating the Arabic linguistic competence of large language models (LLMs). The benchmark spans five core categories: grammar, morphology, spelling, reading comprehension, and…

Bangla is a language spoken by approximately 240 million native speakers and around 300 million people worldwide. Despite being the 5th largest spoken language in the world, Bangla is still a "low-resource" language, and existing pretrained…

Arabic Language Models (LMs) are pretrained predominately on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and are expected to transfer to its dialects. While MSA as the standard written variety is commonly used in formal settings, people speak and write…

We introduce ALARB, a dataset and suite of tasks designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) within the Arabic legal domain. While existing Arabic benchmarks cover some knowledge-intensive tasks such as…

The use of multilingual language models for tasks in low and high-resource languages has been a success story in deep learning. In recent times, Arabic has been receiving widespread attention on account of its dialectal variance. While…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is crucial for human-machine interaction in diverse applications like conversational agents, industrial robotics, call center automation, and automated subtitling. However, developing high-performance ASR…

Hausa texts are often characterized by writing anomalies, such as incorrect character substitutions and spacing errors, which sometimes hinder natural language processing (NLP) applications. This paper presents an approach to automatically…

We study model merging as a practical alternative to conventional adaptation strategies for code-mixed NLP. Starting from a multilingual base model, we: (i) perform continued pre-training (CPT) on unlabeled code-mixed text to obtain an…

Heterogeneous graphs are widely present in real-world complex networks, where the diversity of node and relation types leads to complex and rich semantics. Efforts for modeling complex relation semantics in heterogeneous graphs are…

Humans generally acquire new skills without compromising the old; however, the opposite holds for Large Language Models (LLMs), e.g., from LLaMA to CodeLLaMA. To this end, we propose a new post-pretraining method for LLMs with an expansion…

Large language models are trained on massive scrapes of the web, as required by current scaling laws. Most progress is made for English, given its abundance of high-quality pretraining data. For most other languages, however, such high…

In this work, we address the problem of spelling correction in the Arabic language utilizing the new corpus provided by QALB (Qatar Arabic Language Bank) project which is an annotated corpus of sentences with errors and their corrections.…

Function-calling language models are essential for agentic AI systems that translate natural language into executable structured actions, yet existing models exhibit severe structural instability when applied to Arabic. We present…

Despite recent progress in multilingual speech processing, African languages remain under-represented in both research and deployed systems, particularly when it comes to strong, open-weight encoders that transfer well under low-resource…

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are great translators, but this is largely limited to high-resource languages. For many LLMs, translating in and out of low-resource languages remains a challenging task. To maximize data efficiency…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adopted in educational settings. These applications expand beyond English, though current LLMs remain primarily English-centric. In this work, we ascertain if their use in education…

SALMA, the first Arabic sense-annotated corpus, consists of ~34K tokens, which are all sense-annotated. The corpus is annotated using two different sense inventories simultaneously (Modern and Ghani). SALMA novelty lies in how tokens and…