Hasan Iqbal
Author directory2026
Jais 2: A Family of Arabic-Centric Open Large Language Models
Mohamed Anwar | Abed Alhakim Freihat | George Ibrahim | Mostafa Awad | Abdelrahman Sadallah | Gurpreet Gosal | Gokulakrishnan Ramakrishnan | Sarath Chandran | Biswajit Mishra | Rituraj Joshi | Ahmed Frikha | Etienne Goffinet | Abhishek Maiti | Ali El Filali | Sarah AlBarri | Samujjwal Ghosh | Rahul Pal | Parvez Mullah | Awantika Shukla | Sajid Siddiki | Samta Kamboj | Onkar Pandit | Sunil Kumar Sahu | AbdelRahman Elbadawy | Amr Mohamed | Ahmad Chamma | Evan Dufraisse | Abdelaziz Bounhar | Dani Bouch | Hadi Abdine | Guokan Shang | Fajri Koto | Yuxia Wang | Zhuohan Xie | Ali Mekky | Rania Elbadry | Sarfraz Ahmad | Momina Ahsan | Omar El Herraoui | Daniil Orel | Hasan Iqbal | Kareem Elzeky | Mervat Abassy | Kareem Elozeiri | Saadeldine Eletter | Farah Atif | Nurdaulet Mukhituly | Haonan Li | Xudong Han | Aaryamonvikram Singh | Zainul Abedien Ahmed Quraishi | Neha Sengupta | Larry Murray | Avraham Sheinin | Joel Hestness | Natalia Vassilieva | Hector Xuguang Ren | Zhengzhong Liu | Michalis Vazirgiannis | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mohamed Anwar | Abed Alhakim Freihat | George Ibrahim | Mostafa Awad | Abdelrahman Sadallah | Gurpreet Gosal | Gokulakrishnan Ramakrishnan | Sarath Chandran | Biswajit Mishra | Rituraj Joshi | Ahmed Frikha | Etienne Goffinet | Abhishek Maiti | Ali El Filali | Sarah AlBarri | Samujjwal Ghosh | Rahul Pal | Parvez Mullah | Awantika Shukla | Sajid Siddiki | Samta Kamboj | Onkar Pandit | Sunil Kumar Sahu | AbdelRahman Elbadawy | Amr Mohamed | Ahmad Chamma | Evan Dufraisse | Abdelaziz Bounhar | Dani Bouch | Hadi Abdine | Guokan Shang | Fajri Koto | Yuxia Wang | Zhuohan Xie | Ali Mekky | Rania Elbadry | Sarfraz Ahmad | Momina Ahsan | Omar El Herraoui | Daniil Orel | Hasan Iqbal | Kareem Elzeky | Mervat Abassy | Kareem Elozeiri | Saadeldine Eletter | Farah Atif | Nurdaulet Mukhituly | Haonan Li | Xudong Han | Aaryamonvikram Singh | Zainul Abedien Ahmed Quraishi | Neha Sengupta | Larry Murray | Avraham Sheinin | Joel Hestness | Natalia Vassilieva | Hector Xuguang Ren | Zhengzhong Liu | Michalis Vazirgiannis | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jais 2 is a family of open-weight, Arabic-centric large language models designed for strong Arabic performance and broad cultural coverage. The family includes, to our knowledge, the largest open Arabic-centric LLM trained from scratch, with 70B parameters, alongside an efficient 8B model. A custom Arabic-centric vocabulary supports efficient training and inference, while an optimized architecture and training recipe improve compute efficiency. Jais 2 achieves the highest scores on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard v2 (OALL2) and AraGen v1 among the evaluated open models, while remaining competitive on English benchmarks. It also obtains strong results in Arabic poetry, dream interpretation, translation, and summarization. On the IslamicQA domain, Jais 2-70B achieves the second-highest overall average among the evaluated large open models, while attaining the highest scores on PalmX and the held-out in-house IslamicQA benchmark. We release both model sizes as open-weights on Hugging Face under a commercially permissive license. Jais 2-70B is also available as a chat application on the Web, iOS, and Android, reaching inference speeds of up to 2,000 tokens per second on Cerebras hardware.
MedSNIP: Building and Benchmarking Snippet-Level Granularity for Medical Fact Verification
Hasan Iqbal | Sarfraz Ahmad | Hyunjae Kim | Sihyeon Park | Junjie Liao | Qingyu Chen | Preslav Nakov | Yuxia Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hasan Iqbal | Sarfraz Ahmad | Hyunjae Kim | Sihyeon Park | Junjie Liao | Qingyu Chen | Preslav Nakov | Yuxia Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
A medical claim’s correctness often depends not on the claim alone, but on the clinical structure around it. A claim may require a lab reference range, a causal or conditional link, or patient-specific details to be judged correctly, and atom-level decomposition can fragment these dependencies, leaving the verifier with clinically incomplete claims. We reformulate medical fact-checking around snippet-level verification, where clause-grouped units preserve local clinical structure. We introduce MedSNIP-Bench, a human-annotated benchmark for snippet-level medical fact verification, and MedSNIP, an automatic snippet-generation pipeline. MedSNIP-Bench covers 276 consumer-health and clinical-vignette responses, segmented into 2,524 snippets with dual in-general and in-patient-context labels and six structural pattern codes. MedSNIP is evaluated against human snippet boundaries on MedSNIP-Bench and then used to generate snippet-level units for external corpora. Across MedSNIP-Bench, HealthFC, and MedHallu, snippet-level verification preserves or improves false-class F1, with gains concentrated where answers are long enough to fragment and where the verifier is strong enough to exploit the recovered structure. The largest merge-pattern gain is on causal-conditional clinical chains. It also reduces verifier calls by 24-73%, though the saving survives end-to-end only when decomposition is cheap, which an open-weight decomposer makes possible at no loss of chunking fidelity.
UrduMMLU: A Massive Multitask Benchmark for Urdu Language Understanding
Ahmer Tabassum | Sarfraz Ahmad | Hasan Iqbal | Owais Aijaz | Momina Ahsan | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ahmer Tabassum | Sarfraz Ahmad | Hasan Iqbal | Owais Aijaz | Momina Ahsan | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Meaningful multilingual evaluation must test models in the target language and educational context. Urdu, spoken by more than 230 million people, lacks a broad MMLU-style benchmark built from native educational sources. We introduce UrduMMLU, a benchmark of 26,389 Urdu MCQs across 26 subjects and five domains, collected from native Urdu MCQ banks and public examination PDFs. Unlike translation-based benchmarks, UrduMMLU combines academic subjects with content specific to Urdu and regional education. We label the exam-derived portion through dual human annotation with strict consensus filtering. We evaluate 30 LLMs under English and Urdu prompts, yielding 60 zero-shot evaluations, and further evaluate four open-source LLMs under multiple few-shot settings across both prompt languages. Gemini-3.5-Flash performs best, reaching 90.23% and 90.45% accuracy, while no other model exceeds 85%. The strongest open-source model trails by 7.78 and 9.12 points, and many models lose 25 to 40 points on Urdu-centered Humanities subjects compared with STEM. Few-shot prompting yields only modest gains. Results on UrduMMLU show that current LLMs have uneven Urdu knowledge, particularly for content grounded in the regional context.
2025
FIRE: Fact-checking with Iterative Retrieval and Verification
Zhuohan Xie | Rui Xing | Yuxia Wang | Jiahui Geng | Hasan Iqbal | Dhruv Sahnan | Iryna Gurevych | Preslav Nakov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Zhuohan Xie | Rui Xing | Yuxia Wang | Jiahui Geng | Hasan Iqbal | Dhruv Sahnan | Iryna Gurevych | Preslav Nakov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Fact-checking long-form text is challenging, and it is therefore common practice to break it down into multiple atomic claims. The typical approach to fact-checking these atomic claims involves retrieving a fixed number of pieces of evidence, followed by a verification step. However, this method is usually not cost-effective, as it underutilizes the verification model’s internal knowledge of the claim and fails to replicate the iterative reasoning process in human search strategies. To address these limitations, we propose FIRE, a novel agent-based framework that integrates evidence retrieval and claim verification in an iterative manner. Specifically, FIRE employs a unified mechanism to decide whether to provide a final answer or generate a subsequent search query, based on its confidence in the current judgment. We compare FIRE with other strong fact-checking frameworks and find that it achieves slightly better performance while reducing large language model (LLM) costs by an average of 7.6 times and search costs by 16.5 times. These results indicate that FIRE holds promise for application in large-scale fact-checking operations.
UrduFactCheck: An Agentic Fact-Checking Framework for Urdu with Evidence Boosting and Benchmarking
Sarfraz Ahmad | Hasan Iqbal | Momina Ahsan | Numaan Naeem | Muhammad Ahsan Riaz Khan | Arham Riaz | Muhammad Arslan Manzoor | Yuxia Wang | Preslav Nakov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Sarfraz Ahmad | Hasan Iqbal | Momina Ahsan | Numaan Naeem | Muhammad Ahsan Riaz Khan | Arham Riaz | Muhammad Arslan Manzoor | Yuxia Wang | Preslav Nakov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
The rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised important concerns about the factual reliability of their outputs, particularly in low-resource languages such as Urdu. Existing automated fact-checking systems are predominantly developed for English, leaving a significant gap for the more than 200 million Urdu speakers worldwide. In this work, we present UrduFactBench and UrduFactQA, two novel hand-annotated benchmarks designed to enable fact-checking and factual consistency evaluation in Urdu. While UrduFactBench focuses on claim verification, UrduFactQA targets the factuality of LLMs in question answering. These resources, the first of their kind for Urdu, were developed through a multi-stage annotation process involving native Urdu speakers. To complement these benchmarks, we introduce UrduFactCheck, a modular fact-checking framework that incorporates both monolingual and translation-based evidence retrieval strategies to mitigate the scarcity of high-quality Urdu evidence. Leveraging these resources, we conduct an extensive evaluation of twelve LLMs and demonstrate that translation-augmented pipelines consistently enhance performance compared to monolingual ones. Our findings reveal persistent challenges for open-source LLMs in Urdu and underscore the importance of developing targeted resources. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/UrduFactCheck.
OpenFactCheck: Building, Benchmarking Customized Fact-Checking Systems and Evaluating the Factuality of Claims and LLMs
Yuxia Wang | Minghan Wang | Hasan Iqbal | Georgi N. Georgiev | Jiahui Geng | Iryna Gurevych | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Yuxia Wang | Minghan Wang | Hasan Iqbal | Georgi N. Georgiev | Jiahui Geng | Iryna Gurevych | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
The increased use of large language models (LLMs) across a variety of real-world applications calls for mechanisms to verify the fac- tual accuracy of their outputs. Difficulties lie in assessing the factuality of free-form responses in open domains. Also, different pa- pers use disparate evaluation benchmarks and measurements, which renders them hard to compare and hampers future progress. To mitigate these issues, we propose OpenFactCheck, a unified framework for building customized automatic fact-checking systems, benchmarking their accuracy, evaluating factuality of LLMs, and verifying claims in a document. OpenFactCheck consists of three modules: (i) CUSTCHECKER allows users to easily customize an automatic fact-checker and verify the factual correctness of documents and claims, (ii) LLMEVAL, a unified evaluation framework assesses LLM’s factuality ability from various perspectives fairly, and (iii) CHECKEREVAL is an extensible solution for gauging the reliability of automatic fact-checkers’ verification results using human-annotated datasets. Data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yuxiaw/openfactcheck.
NeuralNexus at BEA 2025 Shared Task: Retrieval-Augmented Prompting for Mistake Identification in AI Tutors
Numaan Naeem | Sarfraz Ahmad | Momina Ahsan | Hasan Iqbal
Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025)
Numaan Naeem | Sarfraz Ahmad | Momina Ahsan | Hasan Iqbal
Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025)
This paper presents our system for Track 1: Mistake Identification in the BEA 2025 Shared Task on Pedagogical Ability Assessment of AI-powered Tutors. The task involves evaluating whether a tutor’s response correctly identifies a mistake in a student’s mathematical reasoning. We explore four approaches: (1) an ensemble of machine learning models over pooled token embeddings from multiple pretrained langauge models (LMs); (2) a frozen sentence-transformer using [CLS] embeddings with an MLP classifier; (3) a history-aware model with multi-head attention between token-level history and response embeddings; and (4) a retrieval-augmented few-shot prompting system with a large language model (LLM) i.e. GPT 4o. Our final system retrieves semantically similar examples, constructs structured prompts, and uses schema-guided output parsing to produce interpretable predictions. It outperforms all baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining example-driven prompting with LLM reasoning for pedagogical feedback assessment.
2024
LLM-DetectAIve: a Tool for Fine-Grained Machine-Generated Text Detection
Mervat Abassy | Kareem Elozeiri | Alexander Aziz | Minh Ngoc Ta | Raj Vardhan Tomar | Bimarsha Adhikari | Saad El Dine Ahmed | Yuxia Wang | Osama Mohammed Afzal | Zhuohan Xie | Jonibek Mansurov | Ekaterina Artemova | Vladislav Mikhailov | Rui Xing | Jiahui Geng | Hasan Iqbal | Zain Muhammad Mujahid | Tarek Mahmoud | Akim Tsvigun | Alham Fikri Aji | Artem Shelmanov | Nizar Habash | Iryna Gurevych | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Mervat Abassy | Kareem Elozeiri | Alexander Aziz | Minh Ngoc Ta | Raj Vardhan Tomar | Bimarsha Adhikari | Saad El Dine Ahmed | Yuxia Wang | Osama Mohammed Afzal | Zhuohan Xie | Jonibek Mansurov | Ekaterina Artemova | Vladislav Mikhailov | Rui Xing | Jiahui Geng | Hasan Iqbal | Zain Muhammad Mujahid | Tarek Mahmoud | Akim Tsvigun | Alham Fikri Aji | Artem Shelmanov | Nizar Habash | Iryna Gurevych | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
The ease of access to large language models (LLMs) has enabled a widespread of machine-generated texts, and now it is often hard to tell whether a piece of text was human-written or machine-generated. This raises concerns about potential misuse, particularly within educational and academic domains. Thus, it is important to develop practical systems that can automate the process. Here, we present one such system, LLM-DetectAIve, designed for fine-grained detection. Unlike most previous work on machine-generated text detection, which focused on binary classification, LLM-DetectAIve supports four categories: (i) human-written, (ii) machine-generated, (iii) machine-written, then machine-humanized, and (iv) human-written, then machine-polished. Category (iii) aims to detect attempts to obfuscate the fact that a text was machine-generated, while category (iv) looks for cases where the LLM was used to polish a human-written text, which is typically acceptable in academic writing, but not in education. Our experiments show that LLM-DetectAIve can effectively identify the above four categories, which makes it a potentially useful tool in education, academia, and other domains.LLM-DetectAIve is publicly accessible at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/LLM-DetectAIve. The video describing our system is available at https://youtu.be/E8eT_bE7k8c.
OpenFactCheck: A Unified Framework for Factuality Evaluation of LLMs
Hasan Iqbal | Yuxia Wang | Minghan Wang | Georgi Nenkov Georgiev | Jiahui Geng | Iryna Gurevych | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Hasan Iqbal | Yuxia Wang | Minghan Wang | Georgi Nenkov Georgiev | Jiahui Geng | Iryna Gurevych | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
The increased use of large language models (LLMs) across a variety of real-world applications calls for automatic tools to check the factual accuracy of their outputs, as LLMs often hallucinate. This is difficult as it requires assessing the factuality of free-form open-domain responses. While there has been a lot of research on this topic, different papers use different evaluation benchmarks and measures,which makes them hard to compare and hampers future progress. To mitigate these issues, we developed OpenFactCheck, a unified framework, with three modules: (i) RESPONSEEVAL, which allows users to easily customize an automatic fact-checking system and to assess the factuality of all claims in an input document using that system, (ii) LLMEVAL, which assesses the overall factuality of an LLM, and (iii) CHECKEREVAL, a module to evaluate automatic fact-checking systems. OpenFactCheck is open-sourced (https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/openfactcheck) and publicly released as a Python library (https://pypi.org/project/openfactcheck/) and also as a web service (http://app.openfactcheck.com). A video describing the system is available at https://youtu.be/-i9VKL0HleI.
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- Preslav Nakov 8
- Yuxia Wang 7
- Sarfraz Ahmad 5
- Momina Ahsan 4
- Jiahui Geng 4
- Iryna Gurevych 4
- Zhuohan Xie 3
- Mervat Abassy 2
- Saadeldine Eletter 2
- Kareem Elozeiri 2
- Numaan Naeem 2
- Minghan Wang 2
- Rui Xing 2
- Hadi Abdine 1
- Bimarsha Adhikari 1
- Osama Mohammed Afzal 1
- Owais Aijaz 1
- Alham Fikri Aji 1
- Sarah AlBarri 1
- Mohamed Anwar 1
- Ekaterina Artemova 1
- Farah Atif 1
- Mostafa Awad 1
- Alexander Aziz 1
- Dani Bouch 1
- Abdelaziz Bounhar 1
- Ahmad Chamma 1
- Sarath Chandran 1
- Qingyu Chen 1
- Evan Dufraisse 1
- Ali El Filali 1
- Omar El Herraoui 1
- AbdelRahman Elbadawy 1
- Rania Elbadry 1
- Kareem Elzeky 1
- Abed Alhakim Freihat 1
- Ahmed Frikha 1
- Georgi N. Georgiev 1
- Georgi Nenkov Georgiev 1
- Samujjwal Ghosh 1
- Etienne Goffinet 1
- Gurpreet Gosal 1
- Nizar Habash 1
- Xudong Han 1
- Joel Hestness 1
- George Ibrahim 1
- Rituraj Joshi 1
- Samta Kamboj 1
- Muhammad Ahsan Riaz Khan 1
- Hyunjae Kim 1
- Fajri Koto 1
- Haonan Li 1
- Junjie Liao 1
- Zhengzhong Liu 1
- Tarek Mahmoud 1
- Abhishek Maiti 1
- Jonibek Mansurov 1
- Muhammad Arslan Manzoor 1
- Ali Mekky 1
- Vladislav Mikhailov 1
- Biswajit Mishra 1
- Amr Mohamed 1
- Zain Muhammad Mujahid 1
- Nurdaulet Mukhituly 1
- Parvez Mullah 1
- Larry Murray 1
- Daniil Orel 1
- Rahul Pal 1
- Onkar Arun Pandit 1
- Sihyeon Park 1
- Zainul Abedien Ahmed Quraishi 1
- Gokulakrishnan Ramakrishnan 1
- Hector Xuguang Ren 1
- Arham Riaz 1
- Abdelrahman Sadallah 1
- Dhruv Sahnan 1
- Sunil Kumar Sahu 1
- Neha Sengupta 1
- Guokan Shang 1
- Avraham Sheinin 1
- Artem Shelmanov 1
- Awantika Shukla 1
- Sajid Siddiki 1
- Aaryamonvikram Singh 1
- Minh Ngoc Ta 1
- Ahmer Tabassum 1
- Raj Vardhan Tomar 1
- Akim Tsvigun 1
- Natalia Vassilieva 1
- Michalis Vazirgiannis 1