This paper investigates the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, focusing on the Arabic lexical information retrieval. Specifically, it analyzes how embedding models affect the recall of Arabic lexical information and evaluates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to produce accurate and contextually relevant answers within the RAG pipelines. We examine a dataset of over 88,000 words from the Riyadh dictionary and evaluate the models using metrics such as Top-K Recall, Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), F1 Score, Cosine Similarity, and Accuracy. The research assesses the capabilities of several embedding models, including E5-large, BGE, AraBERT, CAMeLBERT, and AraELECTRA, highlighting a disparity in performance between sentence embeddings and word embeddings. Sentence embedding with E5 achieved the best results, with a Top-5 Recall of 0.88, and an MRR of 0.48. For the generation models, we evaluated GPT-4, GPT-3.5, SILMA-9B, Gemini-1.5, Aya-8B, and AceGPT-13B based on their ability to generate accurate and contextually appropriate responses. GPT-4 demonstrated the best performance, achieving an F1 score of 0.90, an accuracy of 0.82, and a cosine similarity of 0.87. Our results emphasize the strengths and limitations of both embedding and generation models in Arabic tasks.

This paper outlines the KSAA-CAD shared task, highlighting the Contemporary Arabic Language Dictionary within the scenario of developing a Reverse Dictionary (RD) system and enhancing Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) capabilities. The first KSAA-RD (Al-Matham et al., 2023) highlighted significant gaps in the domain of RDs, which are designed to retrieve words by their meanings or definitions. This shared task comprises two tasks: RD and WSD. The RD task focuses on identifying word embeddings that most accurately match a given definition, termed a “gloss,” in Arabic. Conversely, the WSD task involves determining the specific meaning of a word in context, particularly when the word has multiple meanings. The winning team achieved the highest-ranking score of 0.0644 in RD using Electra embeddings. In this paper, we describe the methods employed by the participating teams and provide insights into the future direction of KSAA-CAD.