The benchmark spans five core categories: grammar, morphology, spelling, reading comprehension, and syntax, through 150 expert-designed multiple choice questions that directly assess structural language understanding. Evaluating 35 Arabic and bilingual LLMs reveals that current models demonstrate strong surface level proficiency but struggle with deeper grammatical and syntactic reasoning. AraLingBench highlights a persistent gap between high scores on knowledge-based benchmarks and true linguistic mastery, showing that many models succeed through memorization or pattern recognition rather than authentic comprehension. By isolating and measuring fundamental linguistic skills, AraLingBench provides a diagnostic framework for developing Arabic LLMs. The full evaluation code is publicly available on GitHub.

This paper describes Elyadata \& LIA's joint submission to the NADI multi-dialectal Arabic Speech Processing 2025. We participated in the Spoken Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) and multi-dialectal Arabic ASR subtasks. Our submission ranked first for the ADI subtask and second for the multi-dialectal Arabic ASR subtask among all participants. Our ADI system is a fine-tuned Whisper-large-v3 encoder with data augmentation. This system obtained the highest ADI accuracy score of \textbf{79.83\%} on the official test set. For multi-dialectal Arabic ASR, we fine-tuned SeamlessM4T-v2 Large (Egyptian variant) separately for each of the eight considered dialects. Overall, we obtained an average WER and CER of \textbf{38.54\%} and \textbf{14.53\%}, respectively, on the test set. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of large pre-trained speech models with targeted fine-tuning for Arabic speech processing.

We present DialectalArabicMMLU, a new benchmark for evaluating the performance of large language models (LLMs) across Arabic dialects. While recently developed Arabic and multilingual benchmarks have advanced LLM evaluation for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), dialectal varieties remain underrepresented despite their prevalence in everyday communication. DialectalArabicMMLU extends the MMLU-Redux framework through manual translation and adaptation of 3K multiple-choice question-answer pairs into five major dialects (Syrian, Egyptian, Emirati, Saudi, and Moroccan), yielding a total of 15K QA pairs across 32 academic and professional domains (22K QA pairs when also including English and MSA). The benchmark enables systematic assessment of LLM reasoning and comprehension beyond MSA, supporting both task-based and linguistic analysis. We evaluate 19 open-weight Arabic and multilingual LLMs (1B-13B parameters) and report substantial performance variation across dialects, revealing persistent gaps in dialectal generalization. DialectalArabicMMLU provides the first unified, human-curated resource for measuring dialectal understanding in Arabic, thus promoting more inclusive evaluation and future model development.

The emergence of ChatGPT marked a transformative milestone for Artificial Intelligence (AI), showcasing the remarkable potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate human-like text. This wave of innovation has revolutionized how we interact with technology, seamlessly integrating LLMs into everyday tasks such as vacation planning, email drafting, and content creation. While English-speaking users have significantly benefited from these advancements, the Arabic world faces distinct challenges in developing Arabic-specific LLMs. Arabic, one of the languages spoken most widely around the world, serves more than 422 million native speakers in 27 countries and is deeply rooted in a rich linguistic and cultural heritage. Developing Arabic LLMs (ALLMs) presents an unparalleled opportunity to bridge technological gaps and empower communities. The journey of ALLMs has been both fascinating and complex, evolving from rudimentary text processing systems to sophisticated AI-driven models. This article explores the trajectory of ALLMs, from their inception to the present day, highlighting the efforts to evaluate these models through benchmarks and public leaderboards. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities that ALLMs present for the Arab world.

We present a graph-based approach enriched with lexicons to predict document-level readability in Arabic, developed as part of the Constrained Track of the BAREC Shared Task 2025. Our system models each document as a sentence-level graph, where nodes represent sentences and lemmas, and edges capture linguistic relationships such as lexical co-occurrence and class membership. Sentence nodes are enriched with features from the SAMER lexicon as well as contextual embeddings from the Arabic transformer model. The graph neural network (GNN) and transformer sentence encoder are trained as two independent branches, and their predictions are combined via late fusion at inference. For document-level prediction, sentence-level outputs are aggregated using max pooling to reflect the most difficult sentence. Experimental results show that this hybrid method outperforms standalone GNN or transformer branches across multiple readability metrics. Overall, the findings highlight that fusion offers advantages at the document level, but the GNN-only approach remains stronger for precise prediction of sentence-level readability.

ArabJobs is a publicly available corpus of Arabic job advertisements collected from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Comprising over 8,500 postings and more than 550,000 words, the dataset captures linguistic, regional, and socio-economic variation in the Arab labour market. We present analyses of gender representation and occupational structure, and highlight dialectal variation across ads, which offers opportunities for future research. We also demonstrate applications such as salary estimation and job category normalisation using large language models, alongside benchmark tasks for gender bias detection and profession classification. The findings show the utility of ArabJobs for fairness-aware Arabic NLP and labour market research. The dataset is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/drelhaj/ArabJobs.

We present a simple, model-agnostic post-processing technique for fine-grained Arabic readability classification in the BAREC 2025 Shared Task (19 ordinal levels). Our method applies conformal prediction to generate prediction sets with coverage guarantees, then computes weighted averages using softmax-renormalized probabilities over the conformal sets. This uncertainty-aware decoding improves Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) by reducing high-penalty misclassifications to nearer levels. Our approach shows consistent QWK improvements of 1-3 points across different base models. In the strict track, our submission achieves QWK scores of 84.9\%(test) and 85.7\% (blind test) for sentence level, and 73.3\% for document level. For Arabic educational assessment, this enables human reviewers to focus on a handful of plausible levels, combining statistical guarantees with practical usability.

We present MSAs winning system for the BAREC 2025 Shared Task on fine-grained Arabic readability assessment, achieving first place in six of six tracks. Our approach is a confidence-weighted ensemble of four complementary transformer models (AraBERTv2, AraELECTRA, MARBERT, and CAMeLBERT) each fine-tuned with distinct loss functions to capture diverse readability signals. To tackle severe class imbalance and data scarcity, we applied weighted training, advanced preprocessing, SAMER corpus relabeling with our strongest model, and synthetic data generation via Gemini 2.5 Flash, adding about 10,000 rare-level samples. A targeted post-processing step corrected prediction distribution skew, delivering a 6.3 percent Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) gain. Our system reached 87.5 percent QWK at the sentence level and 87.4 percent at the document level, demonstrating the power of model and loss diversity, confidence-informed fusion, and intelligent augmentation for robust Arabic readability prediction.

We present the findings of the sixth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI 2025) Shared Task, which focused on Arabic speech dialect processing across three subtasks: spoken dialect identification (Subtask 1), speech recognition (Subtask 2), and diacritic restoration for spoken dialects (Subtask 3). A total of 44 teams registered, and during the testing phase, 100 valid submissions were received from eight unique teams. The distribution was as follows: 34 submissions for Subtask 1 "five teamsæ, 47 submissions for Subtask 2 "six teams", and 19 submissions for Subtask 3 "two teams". The best-performing systems achieved 79.8% accuracy on Subtask 1, 35.68/12.20 WER/CER (overall average) on Subtask 2, and 55/13 WER/CER on Subtask 3. These results highlight the ongoing challenges of Arabic dialect speech processing, particularly in dialect identification, recognition, and diacritic restoration. We also summarize the methods adopted by participating teams and briefly outline directions for future editions of NADI.

Arabic dialects form a diverse continuum, yet NLP models often treat them as discrete categories. Recent work addresses this issue by modeling dialectness as a continuous variable, notably through the Arabic Level of Dialectness (ALDi). However, ALDi reduces complex variation to a single dimension. We propose a complementary measure: the Arabic Generality Score (AGS), which quantifies how widely a word is used across dialects. We introduce a pipeline that combines word alignment, etymology-aware edit distance, and smoothing to annotate a parallel corpus with word-level AGS. A regression model is then trained to predict AGS in context. Our approach outperforms strong baselines, including state-of-the-art dialect ID systems, on a multi-dialect benchmark. AGS offers a scalable, linguistically grounded way to model lexical generality, enriching representations of Arabic dialectness.