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        <title>From FusHa to Folk: Exploring Cross-Lingual Transfer in Arabic Language Models</title>
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        <namePart type="given">Abdulmuizz</namePart>
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    <abstract>Arabic Language Models (LMs) are pretrained predominately on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and are expected to transfer to its dialects. While MSA as the standard written variety is commonly used in formal settings, people speak and write online in various dialects that are spread across the Arab region. This poses limitations for Arabic LMs, since its dialects vary in their similarity to MSA. In this work we study cross-lingual transfer of Arabic models using probing on 3 Natural Language Processing (NLP) Tasks, and representational similarity. Our results indicate that transfer is possible but disproportionate across dialects, which we find to be partially explained by their geographic proximity. Furthermore, we find evidence for negative interference in models trained to support all Arabic dialects. This questions their degree of similarity, and raises concerns for cross-lingual transfer in Arabic models.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T From FusHa to Folk: Exploring Cross-Lingual Transfer in Arabic Language Models
%A Khalak, Abdulmuizz
%A Issam, Abderrahmane
%A Spanakis, Gerasimos
%S Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects
%D 2026
%8 March
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Rabat, Morocco
%F khalak-etal-2026-fusha
%X Arabic Language Models (LMs) are pretrained predominately on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and are expected to transfer to its dialects. While MSA as the standard written variety is commonly used in formal settings, people speak and write online in various dialects that are spread across the Arab region. This poses limitations for Arabic LMs, since its dialects vary in their similarity to MSA. In this work we study cross-lingual transfer of Arabic models using probing on 3 Natural Language Processing (NLP) Tasks, and representational similarity. Our results indicate that transfer is possible but disproportionate across dialects, which we find to be partially explained by their geographic proximity. Furthermore, we find evidence for negative interference in models trained to support all Arabic dialects. This questions their degree of similarity, and raises concerns for cross-lingual transfer in Arabic models.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.vardial-1.16/
%P 196-209

Markdown (Informal)

[From FusHa to Folk: Exploring Cross-Lingual Transfer in Arabic Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2026.vardial-1.16/) (Khalak et al., VarDial 2026)

• From FusHa to Folk: Exploring Cross-Lingual Transfer in Arabic Language Models (Khalak et al., VarDial 2026)

ACL

• Abdulmuizz Khalak, Abderrahmane Issam, and Gerasimos Spanakis. 2026. From FusHa to Folk: Exploring Cross-Lingual Transfer in Arabic Language Models. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, pages 196–209, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.