Recently, extensive research on the hallucination of the large language models (LLMs) has mainly focused on the English language. Despite the growing number of multilingual and Arabic-specific LLMs, evaluating LLMs’ hallucination in the Arabic context remains relatively underexplored. The knowledge gap is particularly pressing given Arabic’s widespread use across many regions and its importance in global communication and media. This paper presents the first comprehensive hallucination evaluation of Arabic and multilingual LLMs on two critical Arabic natural language generation tasks: generative question answering (GQA) and summarization. This study evaluates a total of 12 LLMs, including 4 Arabic pre-trained models, 4 multilingual models, and 4 reasoning-based models. To assess the factual consistency and faithfulness of LLMs’ outputs, we developed a fine-grained hallucination evaluation framework consisting of 12 fine-grained hallucination indicators that represent the varying characteristics of each task. The results reveal that factual hallucinations are more prevalent than faithfulness errors across all models and tasks. Notably, the Arabic pre-trained model Allam consistently demonstrates lower hallucination rates than multilingual models and a comparative performance with reasoning-based models. The code is available at: https://github.com/aishaalansari57/AraHalluEval

We present an overview of the AraGenEval shared task, organized as part of the ArabicNLP 2025 conference. This task introduced the first benchmark suite for Arabic authorship analysis, featuring three subtasks: Authorship Style Transfer, Authorship Identification, and AI-Generated Text Detection. We curated high-quality datasets, including over 47,000 paragraphs from 21 authors and a balanced corpus of human- and AI-generated texts. The task attracted significant global participation, with 72 registered teams from 16 countries. The results highlight the effectiveness of transformer-based models, with top systems leveraging prompt engineering for style transfer, model ensembling for authorship identification, and a mix of multilingual and Arabic-specific models for AI text detection. This paper details the task design, datasets, participant systems, and key findings, establishing a foundation for future research in Arabic stylistics and trustworthy NLP.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in reasoning abilities and general natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their performance on Arabic data, characterized by rich morphology, diverse dialects, and complex script, remains underexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmarking study of multiple reasoning-focused LLMs, with a special emphasis on the newly introduced DeepSeek models, across a suite of fifteen Arabic NLP tasks. We experiment with various strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning. This allows us to systematically evaluate performance on datasets covering a range of applications to examine their capacity for linguistic reasoning under different levels of complexity. Our experiments reveal several key findings. First, carefully selecting just three in-context examples delivers an average uplift of over 13 F1 points on classification tasks—boosting sentiment analysis from 35.3% to 87.5% and paraphrase detection from 56.1% to 87.0%. Second, reasoning-focused DeepSeek architectures outperform a strong GPT o4-mini baseline by an average of 12 F1 points on complex inference tasks in the zero-shot setting. Third, LoRA-based fine-tuning yields up to an additional 8 points in F1 and BLEU compared to equivalent increases in model scale. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AraReasoner41299

Mainstream large vision-language models (LVLMs) inherently encode cultural biases, highlighting the need for diverse multimodal datasets. To address this gap, we introduce PEARL, a large-scale Arabic multimodal dataset and benchmark explicitly designed for cultural understanding. Constructed through advanced agentic workflows and extensive human-in-the-loop annotations by 37 annotators from across the Arab world, PEARL comprises over 309K multimodal examples spanning ten culturally significant domains covering all Arab countries. We further provide two robust evaluation benchmarks (PEARL and PEARL-LITE) along with a specialized subset (PEARL-X) explicitly developed to assess nuanced cultural variations. Comprehensive evaluations on state-of-the-art open and proprietary LVLMs demonstrate that reasoning-centric instruction alignment substantially improves models’ cultural grounding compared to conventional scaling methods. PEARL establishes a foundational resource for advancing culturally-informed multimodal modeling research. All datasets and benchmarks are publicly available.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in analyzing user-generated text to understand opinions expressed on social media. In NLP, this task is known as stance detection, where the goal is to predict whether the writer is in favor, against, or has no opinion on a given topic. Stance detection is crucial for applications such as sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and social media monitoring, as it helps in capturing the nuanced perspectives of users on various subjects. As part of the ArabicNLP 2024 program, we organized the first shared task on Arabic Stance Detection, StanceEval 2024. This initiative aimed to foster advancements in stance detection for the Arabic language, a relatively underrepresented area in Arabic NLP research. This overview paper provides a detailed description of the shared task, covering the dataset, the methodologies used by various teams, and a summary of the results from all participants. We received 28 unique team registrations, and during the testing phase, 16 teams submitted valid entries. The highest classification F-score obtained was 84.38.