AraDiCE: Benchmarks for Dialectal and Cultural Capabilities in LLMs

Basel Mousi, Nadir Durrani, Fatema Ahmad, Md. Arid Hasan, Maram Hasanain, Tameem Kabbani, Fahim Dalvi, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Firoj Alam


Abstract
Arabic, with its rich diversity of dialects, remains significantly underrepresented in Large Language Models, particularly in dialectal variations. We address this gap by introducing seven synthetic datasets in dialects alongside Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), created using Machine Translation (MT) combined with human post-editing. We present AraDiCE, a benchmark for Arabic Dialect and Cultural Evaluation. We evaluate LLMs on dialect comprehension and generation, focusing specifically on low-resource Arabic dialects. Additionally, we introduce the first-ever fine-grained benchmark designed to evaluate cultural awareness across the Gulf, Egypt, and Levant regions, providing a novel dimension to LLM evaluation. Our findings demonstrate that while Arabic-specific models like Jais and AceGPT outperform multilingual models on dialectal tasks, significant challenges persist in dialect identification, generation, and translation. This work contributes ≈45K post-edited samples, a cultural benchmark, and highlights the importance of tailored training to improve LLM performance in capturing the nuances of diverse Arabic dialects and cultural contexts. We have released the dialectal translation models and benchmarks developed in this study (https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/AraDiCE)
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.283
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4186–4218
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.283/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Basel Mousi, Nadir Durrani, Fatema Ahmad, Md. Arid Hasan, Maram Hasanain, Tameem Kabbani, Fahim Dalvi, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, and Firoj Alam. 2025. AraDiCE: Benchmarks for Dialectal and Cultural Capabilities in LLMs. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4186–4218, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AraDiCE: Benchmarks for Dialectal and Cultural Capabilities in LLMs (Mousi et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.283.pdf