The linguistic inclusivity of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Gemni, JAIS, and AceGPT has not been sufficiently explored, particularly in their handling of low-resource languages like Arabic compared to English. While these models have shown impressive performance across various tasks, their effectiveness in Arabic remains under-examined. Punctuation, critical for sentence structure and comprehension in tasks like speech analysis, synthesis, and machine translation, requires precise prediction. This paper assesses seven LLMs: GPT4-o, Gemni1.5, JAIS, AceGPT, SILMA, ALLaM, and CommandR+ for Arabic punctuation prediction. Additionally, the performance of fine-tuned AraBERT is compared with these models in zero-shot and few-shot settings using a proposed Arabic punctuation prediction corpus of 10,044 sentences. The experiments demonstrate that while AraBERT performs well for specific punctuation marks, LLMs show significant promise in zero-shot learning, with further improvements in few-shot scenarios. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs to enhance the automation and accuracy of Arabic text processing.

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.

This paper outlines the KSAA-CAD shared task, highlighting the Contemporary Arabic Language Dictionary within the scenario of developing a Reverse Dictionary (RD) system and enhancing Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) capabilities. The first KSAA-RD (Al-Matham et al., 2023) highlighted significant gaps in the domain of RDs, which are designed to retrieve words by their meanings or definitions. This shared task comprises two tasks: RD and WSD. The RD task focuses on identifying word embeddings that most accurately match a given definition, termed a “gloss,” in Arabic. Conversely, the WSD task involves determining the specific meaning of a word in context, particularly when the word has multiple meanings. The winning team achieved the highest-ranking score of 0.0644 in RD using Electra embeddings. In this paper, we describe the methods employed by the participating teams and provide insights into the future direction of KSAA-CAD.

This paper presents our system “muNERa”, submitted to the WojoodNER 2024 shared task at the second ArabicNLP conference. We participated in two subtasks, the flat and nested fine-grained NER sub-tasks (1 and 2). muNERa achieved first place in the nested NER sub-task and second place in the flat NER sub-task. The system is based on the TANL framework (CITATION),by using a sequence-to-sequence structured language translation approach to model both tasks. We utilize the pre-trained AraT5v2-base model as the base model for the TANL framework. The best-performing muNERa model achieves 91.07% and 90.26% for the F-1 scores on the test sets for the nested and flat subtasks, respectively.

Medical Question Answering systems have gained significant attention in recent years due to their potential to enhance medical decision-making and improve patient care. However, most of the research in this field has focused on English-language datasets, limiting the generalizability of MQA systems to non-English speaking regions. This study introduces AraMed, a large-scale Arabic Medical Question Answering dataset addressing the limited resources available for Arabic medical question answering. AraMed comprises of 270k question-answer pairs based on health consumer questions submitted to online medical forum. Experiments using various deep learning models showcase the dataset’s effectiveness, particularly with AraBERT models achieving highest results, specifically AraBERTv2 obtained an F1 score of 96.73% in the answer selection task. The comparative analysis of different deep learning models provides insights into their strengths and limitations. These findings highlight the potential of AraMed for advancing Arabic medical question answering research and development.

This paper outlines the KSAA-RD shared task, which aims to develop a Reverse Dictionary (RD) system for the Arabic language. RDs allow users to find words based on their meanings or definition. This shared task, KSAA-RD, includes two subtasks: Arabic RD and cross-lingual reverse dictionaries (CLRD). Given a definition (referred to as a “gloss”) in either Arabic or English, the teams compete to find the most similar word embeddings of their corresponding word. The winning team achieved 24.20 and 12.70 for RD and CLRD, respectively in terms of rank metric. In this paper, we describe the methods employed by the participating teams and offer an outlook for KSAA-RD.