ASCAT: Arabic Scientific Benchmark for Advanced Translation Evaluation

Serry Sibaee, Khloud Al Jallad, Zineb Yousfi, Israa Elhosiny, Yousra Yousra El-Ghawi, Batool Balah, Omer Nacar


Abstract
We present ASCAT (Arabic Scientific Corpus for Advanced Translation), a high-quality English-Arabic parallel benchmark corpus designed for scientific translation evaluation constructed through a systematic multi-engine machine translation and expert post-editing pipeline. Unlike existing Arabic-English corpora that rely on short sentences or single-domain text, ASCAT targets full scientific abstracts averaging 125.3 words (English) and 111.78 words (Arabic), drawn from five scientific domains: physics, mathematics, computer science, quantum mechanics, and artificial intelligence. Each abstract was translated using three complementary architectures generative AI (Gemini), transformer-based models (Hugging Face quickmt-en-ar), and commercial MT APIs (Google Translate, DeepL) and subsequently post-edited by domain experts at the lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels. The resulting corpus contains 67,293 English tokens and 60,026 Arabic tokens, with an Arabic vocabulary of 17,604 unique words reflecting the morphological richness of the language. We benchmark three state-of-the-art LLMs on the corpus GPT-4o-mini (BLEU: 37.07), Gemini-3.0-Flash-Preview (BLEU: 30.44), and Qwen3-235B-A22B (BLEU: 23.68) demonstrating its discriminative power as an evaluation benchmark. ASCAT addresses a critical gap in scientific MT resources for Arabic and is designed to support rigorous evaluation of scientific translation quality and training of domain-specific translation models.
Anthology ID:
2026.osact-1.9
Volume:
The 7th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT7) with 5 Shared Tasks
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Hend Al-Khalifa, Mo El-Haj, Saad Ezzini
Venues:
OSACT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
76–80
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-osact-09
DOI:
10.63317/3328e5bk8rrs
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Serry Sibaee, Khloud Al Jallad, Zineb Yousfi, Israa Elhosiny, Yousra Yousra El-Ghawi, Batool Balah, and Omer Nacar. 2026. ASCAT: Arabic Scientific Benchmark for Advanced Translation Evaluation. In The 7th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT7) with 5 Shared Tasks, pages 76–80, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ASCAT: Arabic Scientific Benchmark for Advanced Translation Evaluation (Sibaee et al., OSACT 2026)
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