MedArabiQ: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Arabic Medical Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant promise for various applications in healthcare. However, their efficacy in the Arabic medical domain remains unexplored due to the lack of high-quality domain-specific datasets and benchmarks. This study introduces MedArabiQ, a novel benchmark dataset consisting of seven Arabic medical tasks, covering multiple specialties and including multiple choice questions, fill-in-the-blank, and patient-doctor question answering. We first constructed the dataset using past medical exams and publicly available datasets. We then introduced different modifications to evaluate various LLM capabilities, including bias mitigation. We conducted an extensive evaluation with five state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LLMs, including GPT-4o, Claude 3.5-Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5. Our findings highlight the need for the creation of new high-quality benchmarks that span different languages to ensure fair deployment and scalability of LLMs in healthcare. By establishing this benchmark and releasing the dataset, we provide a foundation for future research aimed at evaluating and enhancing the multilingual capabilities of LLMs for the equitable use of generative AI in healthcare.

Proper Name Diacritization for Arabic Wikipedia: A Benchmark Dataset

Proper names in Arabic Wikipedia are frequently undiacritized, creating ambiguity in pronunciation and interpretation, especially for transliterated named entities of foreign origin. While transliteration and diacritization have been well-studied separately in Arabic NLP,their intersection remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce a new manually diacritized dataset of Arabic proper names of various origins with their English Wikipedia equivalent glosses, and present the challenges and guidelines we followed to create it. We benchmark GPT-4o on the task of recovering full diacritization given the undiacritized Arabic and English forms, and analyze its performance. Achieving 73% accuracy, our results underscore both the difficulty of the task and the need for improved models and resources. We release our dataset to facilitate further research on Arabic Wikipedia proper name diacritization.

ARWI: Arabic Write and Improve

Although Arabic is spoken by over 400 million people, advanced Arabic writing assistance tools remain limited. To address this gap, we present ARWI, a new writing assistant that helps learners improve essay writing in Modern Standard Arabic. ARWI is the first publicly available Arabic writing assistant to include a prompt database for different proficiency levels, an Arabic text editor, state-of-the-art grammatical error detection and correction, and automated essay scoring aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference standards for language attainment. Moreover, ARWI can be used to gather a growing auto-annotated corpus, facilitating further research on Arabic grammar correction and essay scoring, as well as profiling patterns of errors made by native speakers and non-native learners. A preliminary user study shows that ARWI provides actionable feedback, helping learners identify grammatical gaps, assess language proficiency, and guide improvement.

The Impact of Code-switched Synthetic Data Quality is Task Dependent: Insights from MT and ASR

Code-switching, the act of alternating between languages, emerged as a prevalent global phenomenon that needs to be addressed for building user-friendly language technologies. A main bottleneck in this pursuit is data scarcity, motivating research in the direction of code-switched data augmentation. However, current literature lacks comprehensive studies that enable us to understand the relation between the quality of synthetic data and improvements on NLP tasks. We extend previous research conducted in this direction on machine translation (MT) with results on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and cascaded speech translation (ST) to test generalizability of findings. Our experiments involve a wide range of augmentation techniques, covering lexical replacements, linguistic theories, and back-translation. Based on the results of MT, ASR, and ST, we draw conclusions and insights regarding the efficacy of various augmentation techniques and the impact of quality on performance.

Enhancing Text Editing for Grammatical Error Correction: Arabic as a Case Study

Text editing frames grammatical error correction (GEC) as a sequence tagging problem, where edit tags are assigned to input tokens, and applying these edits results in the corrected text. This approach has gained attention for its efficiency and interpretability. However, while extensively explored for English, text editing remains largely underexplored for morphologically rich languages like Arabic. In this paper, we introduce a text editing approach that derives edit tags directly from data, eliminating the need for language-specific edits. We demonstrate its effectiveness on Arabic, a diglossic and morphologically rich language, and investigate the impact of different edit representations on model performance. Our approach achieves SOTA results on two Arabic GEC benchmarks and performs on par with SOTA on two others. Additionally, our models are over six times faster than existing Arabic GEC systems, making our approach more practical for real-world applications. Finally, we explore ensemble models, demonstrating how combining different models leads to further performance improvements. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.

A Large and Balanced Corpus for Fine-grained Arabic Readability Assessment

This paper introduces the Balanced Arabic Readability Evaluation Corpus BAREC, a large-scale, fine-grained dataset for Arabic readability assessment. BAREC consists of 68,182 sentences spanning 1+ million words, carefully curated to cover 19 readability levels, from kindergarten to postgraduate comprehension. The corpus balances genre diversity, topical coverage, and target audiences, offering a comprehensive resource for evaluating Arabic text complexity. The corpus was fully manually annotated by a large team of annotators. The average pairwise inter-annotator agreement, measured by Quadratic Weighted Kappa, is 81.3%, reflecting a high level of substantial agreement. Beyond presenting the corpus, we benchmark automatic readability assessment across different granularity levels, comparing a range of techniques. Our results highlight the challenges and opportunities in Arabic readability modeling, demonstrating competitive performance across various methods. To support research and education, we will make BAREC openly available, along with detailed annotation guidelines and benchmark results.

Is Human-Like Text Liked by Humans? Multilingual Human Detection and Preference Against AI

Prior studies have shown that distinguishing text generated by large language models (LLMs) from human-written one is highly challenging, and often no better than random guessing. To verify the generalizability of this finding across languages and domains, we perform an extensive case study to identify the upper bound of human detection accuracy. Across 16 datasets covering 9 languages and 9 domains, 19 annotators achieved an average detection accuracy of 87.6%, thus challenging previous conclusions. We find that major gaps between human and machine text lie in concreteness, cultural nuances, and diversity. Prompting by explicitly explaining the distinctions in the prompts can partially bridge the gaps in over 50% of the cases. However, we also find that humans do not always prefer human-written text, particularly when they cannot clearly identify its source.

GenAI Content Detection Task 1: English and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection: AI vs. Human

We present the GenAI Content Detection Task~1 -- a shared task on binary machine generated text detection, conducted as a part of the GenAI workshop at COLING 2025. The task consists of two subtasks: Monolingual (English) and Multilingual. The shared task attracted many participants: 36 teams made official submissions to the Monolingual subtask during the test phase and 26 teams -- to the Multilingual. We provide a comprehensive overview of the data, a summary of the results -- including system rankings and performance scores -- detailed descriptions of the participating systems, and an in-depth analysis of submissions. https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/COLING-2025-Workshop-on-MGT-Detection-Task1

A Derivational ChainBank for Modern Standard Arabic

This study presents the ``Arabic Derivational ChainBank,'' a novel framework for modeling Arabic derivational morphology. It establishes connections between forms and meanings by constructing a chain of derived words that reflect their derivational significance. To expedite the process, a rule-based methodology was employed, avoiding time-consuming manual annotation. The derivational network was then aligned with the CamelMorph morphological analyzer database. This two-step process resulted in a chain of derived word lemmas linked to their roots, encompassing 23,333 evaluated derivational relations, thereby demonstrating the efficiency of the ChainBank.

Guidelines for Fine-grained Sentence-level Arabic Readability Annotation

This paper presents the foundational framework and initial findings of the Balanced Arabic Readability Evaluation Corpus (BAREC) project, designed to address the need for comprehensive Arabic language resources aligned with diverse readability levels. Inspired by the Taha/Arabi21 readability reference, BAREC aims to provide a standardized reference for assessing sentence-level Arabic text readability across 19 distinct levels, ranging in targets from kindergarten to postgraduate comprehension. Our ultimate goal with BAREC is to create a comprehensive and balanced corpus that represents a wide range of genres, topics, and regional variations through a multifaceted approach combining manual annotation with AI-driven tools. This paper focuses on our meticulous annotation guidelines, demonstrated through the analysis of 10,631 sentences/phrases (113,651 words). The average pairwise inter-annotator agreement, measured by Quadratic Weighted Kappa, is 79.9%, reflecting a high level of substantial agreement. We also report competitive results for benchmarking automatic readability assessment. We will make the BAREC corpus and guidelines openly accessible to support Arabic language research and education.