Organizations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Abstract
Poetry has long been a central art form for Arabic speakers, serving as a powerful medium of expression and cultural identity. While modern Arabic speakers continue to value poetry, existing research on Arabic poetry within Large Language Models (LLMs) has primarily focused on analysis tasks such as interpretation or metadata prediction, e.g., rhyme schemes and titles. In contrast, our work addresses the practical aspect of poetry creation in Arabic by introducing controllable generation capabilities to assist users in writing poetry. Specifically, we present a large-scale, carefully curated instruction-based dataset in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and various Arabic dialects. This dataset enables tasks such as writing, revising, and continuing poems based on predefined criteria, including style and rhyme, as well as performing poetry analysis. Our experiments show that fine-tuning LLMs on this dataset yields models that can effectively generate poetry that is aligned with user requirements, based on both automated metrics and human evaluation with native Arabic speakers. The data and the code are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/instructpoet-ar
Arabic morphology remains challenging for large language models, since fluent generation does not guarantee accurate morphosyntactic control. Existing Arabic evaluations mainly target downstream tasks and do not directly test controlled morphological generation from explicit lexical and feature-based input. We introduce YallaMorph, a large-scale benchmark for Arabic morphological generation covering verbs, nouns, adjectives, their cliticized forms, and invalid configurations. We evaluate multilingual and Arabic-oriented LLMs under diacritized and undiacritized settings over 600K benchmark entries. Results show that Arabic morphological generation remains difficult, especially for cliticized, unseen, and morphologically rare forms.
There is a significant gap in evaluating cultural reasoning in LLMs using conversational datasets that capture culturally rich and dialectal contexts. Most Arabic benchmarks focus on short text snippets in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), overlooking the cultural nuances that naturally arise in dialogues. To address this gap, we introduce ArabCulture-Dialogue, a culturally grounded conversational dataset covering 13 Arabic-speaking countries, in both MSA and each country's respective dialect, spanning 12 daily-life topics and 54 fine-grained subtopics. We utilize the dataset to form three benchmarking tasks: (i) multiple-choice cultural reasoning, (ii) machine translation between MSA and dialects, and (iii) dialect-steering generation. Our experiments indicate that the performance gap between MSA and Arabic dialects still exists, whereby the models perform worse on all three tasks in the dialectal setup, compared to the MSA one.
Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar, Saeed Almheiri, Momina Ahsan +13
While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate fluent Arabic text, their ability to reliably control readability levels remains unclear. We propose a multi-dimensional evaluation framework for Common European Framework of Reference for Language (CEFR)-controlled Arabic text generation, assessing whether instruction-following LLMs can serve as reliable generators for adaptive language learning. Our framework integrates controlled prompting, automatic readability prediction using a validated Taha-19 model, lexical constraint validation, and syntactic complexity profiling. Results show that structured prompting substantially improves CEFR alignment. In particular, CEFR-guided prompting with lexical constraints achieves the highest conformity to reference linguistic profiles (0.91 cosine similarity) and near-perfect agreement with predicted readability levels (0.99), while unconstrained prompting exhibits weak control. These findings establish an empirical foundation for integrating readability-aware Arabic text generation into adaptive educational systems.