Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as an effective strategy to ground Large Language Models (LLMs) with reliable, real-time information. This paper investigates the trade-off between cost and performance by evaluating 13 LLMs within a RAG pipeline for the Question Answering (Q&A) task under noisy retrieval conditions. We assess four extractive and nine generative models—spanning both open- and closed-source ones of varying sizes—on a journalistic benchmark specifically designed for RAG. By systematically varying the level of noise injected into the retrieved context, we analyze not only which models perform best, but also their robustness to noisy input. Results show that large open-source generative models (approx. 70B parameters) achieve performance and noise tolerance on par with top-tier closed-source models. However, their computational demands limit their practicality in resource-constrained settings. In contrast, medium-sized open-source models (approx. 7B parameters) emerge as a compelling compromise, balancing efficiency, robustness, and accessibility.

This paper presents (AraSAS) the first open-source Arabic semantic analysis tagging system. AraSAS is a software framework that provides full semantic tagging of text written in Arabic. AraSAS is based on the UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) which was first developed to semantically tag English text. Similarly to USAS, AraSAS uses a hierarchical semantic tag set that contains 21 major discourse fields and 232 fine-grained semantic field tags. The paper describes the creation, validation and evaluation of AraSAS. In addition, we demonstrate a first case study to illustrate the affordances of applying USAS and AraSAS semantic taggers on the Zayed University Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC) (Palfreyman and Habash, 2022), where we show and compare the coverage of the two semantic taggers through running them on Arabic and English essays on different topics. The analysis expands to compare the taggers when run on texts in Arabic and English written by the same writer and texts written by male and by female students. Variables for comparison include frequency of use of particular semantic sub-domains, as well as the diversity of semantic elements within a text.

In this paper we explore the functionalities of ET, a suite designed to support linguistic research and natural language processing tasks using corpora annotated in the CoNLL-U format. These goals are achieved by two integrated environments – Interrogatório, an environment for querying and editing annotated corpora, and Julgamento, an environment for assessing their quality. ET is open-source, built on different Python Web technologies and has Web demonstrations available on-line. ET has been intensively used in our research group for over two years, being the chosen framework for several linguistic and NLP-related studies conducted by its researchers.