Spontaneous Arabic speech is scarce in current corpora, and it is not well represented. This poses a limitation invisibility of spontaneous Arabic to automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker diarization, and sociolinguistic research. The Saudi ASWAT project fills a major gap by creating the first nationwide corpus of natural Saudi speech, where data has been recorded and transcribed under a systematic methodology and ecologically valid conditions. The corpus aims to collect 2,500 hours of natural conversations from a diverse range of participants. These has been selected from five major Saudi regional varieties, Najdi (Central), Eastern, Hijazi (Western), Northern, and Southern, covering more than fifty five local varieties. Speech has been recorded by trained fieldworkers using participants own devices to reflect real-life variation. The annotated data incorporate a variety of speaker demographics, regional vocabularies which differ from the standard lexicon, and structured metadata. TF–IDF profiling shows regional differences in a range of performing words. Data also represent balanced age and gender sampling to support studies of intergenerational and sociophonetic variation. Saudi ASWAT provides the most linguistically diverse resources of Saudi Arabia to date. Additionally, it establishes an ethical governed framework for Arabic speech data creation to enable advances in both computational modeling and linguistic research.

This paper provides an overview of Contemporary Arabic Lexicon (Mu’jam Arriyadh). It is a contemporary and inclusive Arabic dictionary that has been specifically developed to cater to the needs of both native and non-native Arabic speakers. The corpus utilized in this study is derived from the Arabic Contemporary Corpus for Analysis (ACCA), which encompasses a vast collection of 450 million words of Modern Standard Arabic spanning the previous century. Significantly, the lexicon in question prioritizes lemma-based entries over root forms, hence enhancing its user-friendliness and adaptability across different contexts. The resource offers comprehensive linguistic data pertaining to a wide array of Arabic vocabulary, encompassing morphological, morph-syntactic, and semantic aspects. The Lexicon has been developed in accordance with the ISO 24613 standard, which improves its ability to be processed by machines and facilitates the utilization of natural language processing systems. The database encompasses a range of linguistic aspects, such as synonyms, antonyms, and root forms, offering a comprehensive compilation. Mu’jam Arriyadh is a contemporary Arabic lexicon that is designed to be accessible to users, compatible with machine processing, and highly beneficial for anyone studying the language, conducting research, and utilizing natural language processing technologies.

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.