Arabic Morphosyntactic Tagging and Dependency Parsing with Large Language Models

Mohamed Adel, Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash


Abstract
LLMs perform strongly across NLP, but their ability to produce explicit grammatical analyses remains unclear. Arabic provides a challenging testbed due to its rich morphology and orthographic ambiguity, which create strong morphology–syntax interactions. We present a unified evaluation of LLMs on Arabic morphosyntactic tagging and dependency parsing, covering pre-tokenized, raw-text, and cascaded settings. We compare zero-shot prompting with retrieval-based in-context learning. Relevant demonstrations substantially improve performance. The strongest LLMs approach supervised tagging and parsing systems; however, they require substantial annotated data for demonstration retrieval and considerable computational resources. We make all code and data used in this paper publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1467
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
33582–33604
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1467/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohamed Adel, Bashar Alhafni, and Nizar Habash. 2026. Arabic Morphosyntactic Tagging and Dependency Parsing with Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 33582–33604, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Arabic Morphosyntactic Tagging and Dependency Parsing with Large Language Models (Adel et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1467.pdf