Hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge and continues to draw substantial research attention. The problem becomes especially critical when hallucinations arise in sensitive domains, such as religious discourse. To address this gap, we introduce IslamicEval 2025—the first shared task specifically focused on evaluating and detecting hallucinations in Islamic content. The task consists of two subtasks: (1) Hallucination Detection and Correction of quoted verses (Ayahs) from the Holy Quran and quoted Hadiths; and (2) Qur’an and Hadith Question Answering, which assesses retrieval models and LLMs by requiring answers to be retrieved from grounded, authoritative sources. Thirteen teams participated in the final phase of the shared task, employing a range of pipelines and frameworks. Their diverse approaches underscore both the complexity of the task and the importance of effectively managing hallucinations in Islamic discourse.

Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently reflect the vast data distributions they encounter during their pre-training phase. As this data is predominantly sourced from the web, there is a high chance it will be skewed towards high-resourced languages and cultures, such as those of the West. Consequently, LLMs often exhibit a diminished understanding of certain communities, a gap that is particularly evident in their knowledge of Arabic and Islamic cultures. This issue becomes even more pronounced with increasingly under-represented topics. To address this critical challenge, we introduce PalmX 2025, the first shared task designed to benchmark the cultural competence of LLMs in these specific domains. The task is composed of two subtasks featuring multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): General Arabic Culture and General Islamic Culture. These subtasks cover a wide range of topics, including traditions, food, history, religious practices, and language expressions from across 22 Arab countries. The initiative drew considerable interest, with 26 teams registering for Subtask 1 and 19 for Subtask 2, culminating in nine and six valid submissions, respectively. Our findings reveal that task-specific fine-tuning substantially boosts performance over baseline models. The top-performing systems achieved an accuracy of 72.15% on cultural questions and 84.22% on Islamic knowledge. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning emerged as the predominant and most effective approach among participants, while the utility of data augmentation was found to be domain-dependent. Ultimately, this benchmark provides a crucial, standardized framework to guide the development of more culturally grounded and competent Arabic LLMs. Results of the shared task demonstrate that general cultural and general religious knowledge remain challenging to LLMs, motivating us to continue to offer the shared task in the future.

Arabic diacritics, similar to short vowels in English, provide phonetic and grammatical information but are typically omitted in written Arabic, leading to ambiguity. Diacritization (aka diacritic restoration or vowelization) is essential for natural language processing. This paper advances Arabic diacritization through the following contributions: first, we propose a methodology to analyze and refine a large diacritized corpus to improve training quality. Second, we introduce WikiNews-2024, a multi-reference evaluation methodology with an updated version of the standard benchmark “WikiNews-2014”. In addition, we explore various model architectures and propose a BiLSTM-based model that achieves state-of-the-art results with 3.12% and 2.70% WER on WikiNews-2014 and WikiNews-2024, respectively. Moreover, we develop a model that preserves user-specified diacritics while maintaining accuracy. Lastly, we demonstrate that augmenting training data enhances performance in low-resource settings.