This paper investigates the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, focusing on the Arabic lexical information retrieval. Specifically, it analyzes how embedding models affect the recall of Arabic lexical information and evaluates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to produce accurate and contextually relevant answers within the RAG pipelines. We examine a dataset of over 88,000 words from the Riyadh dictionary and evaluate the models using metrics such as Top-K Recall, Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), F1 Score, Cosine Similarity, and Accuracy. The research assesses the capabilities of several embedding models, including E5-large, BGE, AraBERT, CAMeLBERT, and AraELECTRA, highlighting a disparity in performance between sentence embeddings and word embeddings. Sentence embedding with E5 achieved the best results, with a Top-5 Recall of 0.88, and an MRR of 0.48. For the generation models, we evaluated GPT-4, GPT-3.5, SILMA-9B, Gemini-1.5, Aya-8B, and AceGPT-13B based on their ability to generate accurate and contextually appropriate responses. GPT-4 demonstrated the best performance, achieving an F1 score of 0.90, an accuracy of 0.82, and a cosine similarity of 0.87. Our results emphasize the strengths and limitations of both embedding and generation models in Arabic tasks.

The impressive advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in English has not been matched across all languages. In particular, LLM performance in Arabic lags behind, due to data scarcity, linguistic diversity of Arabic and its dialects, morphological complexity, etc. Progress is further hindered by the quality of Arabic benchmarks, which typically rely on static, publicly available data, lack comprehensive task coverage, or do not provide dedicated platforms with blind test sets. This makes it challenging to measure actual progress and to mitigate data contamination. Here, we aim to bridge these gaps. In particular, we introduce BALSAM, a comprehensive, community-driven benchmark aimed at advancing Arabic LLM development and evaluation. It includes 78 NLP tasks from 14 broad categories, with 52K examples divided into 37K test and 15K development, and a centralized, transparent platform for blind evaluation. We envision BALSAM as a unifying platform that sets standards and promotes collaborative research to advance Arabic LLM capabilities.