From Language to Action in Arabic: Reliable Structured Tool Calling via Data-Centric Fine-Tuning
This addresses the challenge of reliable tool calling in Arabic for agentic AI systems, representing a domain-specific incremental improvement.
The paper tackled the problem of severe structural instability in function-calling language models for Arabic, achieving a reduction in parse failures from 87% to below 1% and an eightfold improvement in function name accuracy through data-centric fine-tuning.
Function-calling language models are essential for agentic AI systems that translate natural language into executable structured actions, yet existing models exhibit severe structural instability when applied to Arabic. We present AISA-AR-FunctionCall, a production-oriented Arabic function-calling framework built on a 270M-parameter FunctionGemma backbone and trained through systematic dataset auditing, schema repair, tool-aware prompt restructuring, and full-parameter supervised fine-tuning. On a held-out test set, fine-tuning reduces parse failures from 87\% to below 1\%, improves function name accuracy by more than eightfold, and substantially enhances argument alignment across dialects and domains. Error analysis reveals a transition from structural collapse to semantic misalignment, suggesting that serialization stability and decision-level reasoning are separable challenges. We further explore a reasoning-augmented LoRA variant that introduces explicit intermediate reasoning prior to tool invocation. All datasets and models are publicly released under the AISA framework.