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

Stance detection is a key NLP problem that classifies a writer’s viewpoint on a topic based on their writing. This paper outlines our approach for Stance Detection in Arabic Language Shared Task (StanceEval2024), focusing on attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine, digital transformation, and women’s empowerment. The proposed model uses parallel multi-task learning with two fine-tuned BERT-based models combined via an attention module. Results indicate this ensemble outperforms a single BERT model, demonstrating the benefits of using BERT architectures trained on diverse datasets. Specifically, Arabert-Twitterv2, trained on tweets, and Camel-Lab, trained on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Dialectal Arabic (DA), and Classical Arabic (CA), allowed us to leverage diverse Arabic dialects and styles.