Chatrine Qwaider

Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Chatrine Qwaider, Ilias Kolokousis et al.

In this paper, we present a dataset for the computational study of a number of Modern Greek dialects. It consists of raw text data from four dialects of Modern Greek, Cretan, Pontic, Northern Greek and Cypriot Greek. The dataset is of considerable size, albeit imbalanced, and presents the first attempt to create large scale dialectal resources of this type for Modern Greek dialects. We then use the dataset to perform dialect idefntification. We experiment with traditional ML algorithms, as well as simple DL architectures. The results show very good performance on the task, potentially revealing that the dialects in question have distinct enough characteristics allowing even simple ML models to perform well on the task. Error analysis is performed for the top performing algorithms showing that in a number of cases the errors are due to insufficient dataset cleaning.

Chatrine Qwaider, Bashar Alhafni, Kirill Chirkunov et al.

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) plays a crucial role in assessing language learners' writing quality, reducing grading workload, and providing real-time feedback. The lack of annotated essay datasets inhibits the development of Arabic AES systems. This paper leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and Transformer models to generate synthetic Arabic essays for AES. We prompt an LLM to generate essays across the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) proficiency levels and introduce and compare two approaches to error injection. We create a dataset of 3,040 annotated essays with errors injected using our two methods. Additionally, we develop a BERT-based Arabic AES system calibrated to CEFR levels. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our synthetic dataset in improving Arabic AES performance. We make our code and data publicly available.

Yara Alakeel, Chatrine Qwaider, Hanan Aldarmaki et al.

This work investigates how effectively large language models (LLMs) and their tokenization schemes represent and generate Arabic root-pattern morphology, probing whether they capture genuine morphological structure or rely on surface memorization. Arabic morphological system provides a rich testbed for analyzing how LLMs handle complex, non-concatenative forms and how tokenization choices influence this process. Our study begins with an evaluation of morphological fidelity across Arabic and multilingual tokenizers against gold-standard segmentation, followed by an analysis of LLM performance in productive root-pattern generation using a newly developed test set. Our findings across seven Arabic-centric and multilingual LLMs and their respective tokenizers reveal that tokenizer morphological alignment is not necessary nor sufficient for morphological generation, which questions the role of morphological tokenization in downstream performance.

Abdelrahman Sadallah, Junior Cedric Tonga, Khalid Almubarak et al.

Despite progress in Arabic large language models, such as Jais and AceGPT, their evaluation on commonsense reasoning has largely relied on machine-translated datasets, which lack cultural depth and may introduce Anglocentric biases. Commonsense reasoning is shaped by geographical and cultural contexts, and existing English datasets fail to capture the diversity of the Arab world. To address this, we introduce ArabCulture, a commonsense reasoning dataset in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), covering cultures of 13 countries across the Gulf, Levant, North Africa, and the Nile Valley. The dataset was built from scratch by engaging native speakers to write and validate culturally relevant questions for their respective countries. ArabCulture spans 12 daily life domains with 54 fine-grained subtopics, reflecting various aspects of social norms, traditions, and everyday experiences. Zero-shot evaluations show that open-weight language models with up to 32B parameters struggle to comprehend diverse Arab cultures, with performance varying across regions. These findings highlight the need for more culturally aware models and datasets tailored to the Arabic-speaking world.

Kirill Chirkunov, Bashar Alhafni, Chatrine Qwaider et al.

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.