AutoArabic: A Three-Stage Framework for Localizing Video-Text Retrieval Benchmarks

Mohamed Eltahir, Osamah Sarraj, Abdulrahman M. Alfrihidi, Taha Alshatiri, Mohammed Khurd, Mohammed Bremoo, Tanveer Hussain


Abstract
Video-to-text and text-to-video retrieval are dominated by English benchmarks (e.g. DiDeMo, MSR-VTT) and recent multilingual corpora (e.g. RUDDER), yet Arabic remains underserved, lacking localized evaluation metrics. We introduce a three-stage framework, AutoArabic, utilizing state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to translate non-Arabic benchmarks into Modern Standard Arabic, reducing the manual revision required by nearly fourfold. The framework incorporates an error detection module that automatically flags potential translation errors with 97% accuracy. Applying the framework to DiDeMo, a video retrieval benchmark produces DiDeMo-AR, an Arabic variant with 40,144 fluent Arabic descriptions. An analysis of the translation errors is provided and organized into an insightful taxonomy to guide future Arabic localization efforts. We train a CLIP-style baseline with identical hyperparameters on the Arabic and English variants of the benchmark, finding a moderate performance gap (𝛥 ≈ 3pp at Recall@1), indicating that Arabic localization preserves benchmark difficulty. We evaluate three post-editing budgets (zero/ flagged-only/ full) and find that performance improves monotonically with more post-editing, while the raw LLM output (zero-budget) remains usable. To ensure reproducibility to other languages, we made the code available at https://github.com/Tahaalshatiri/AutoArabic.
Anthology ID:
2025.arabicnlp-main.23
Volume:
Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Kareem Darwish, Ahmed Ali, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Samia Touileb, Imed Zitouni, Ahmed Abdelali, Sharefah Al-Ghamdi, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Wajdi Zaghouani, Salam Khalifa, Badr AlKhamissi, Rawan Almatham, Injy Hamed, Zaid Alyafeai, Areeb Alowisheq, Go Inoue, Khalil Mrini, Waad Alshammari
Venue:
ArabicNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
288–297
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.arabicnlp-main.23/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohamed Eltahir, Osamah Sarraj, Abdulrahman M. Alfrihidi, Taha Alshatiri, Mohammed Khurd, Mohammed Bremoo, and Tanveer Hussain. 2025. AutoArabic: A Three-Stage Framework for Localizing Video-Text Retrieval Benchmarks. In Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference, pages 288–297, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AutoArabic: A Three-Stage Framework for Localizing Video-Text Retrieval Benchmarks (Eltahir et al., ArabicNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.arabicnlp-main.23.pdf