Punctuation restoration is essential for improving the readability and downstream utility of automatic speech recognition (ASR) outputs, yet remains underexplored for Persian despite its importance. We introduce PersianPunc, a large-scale, high-quality dataset of 17 million samples for Persian punctuation restoration, constructed through systematic aggregation and filtering of existing textual resources. We formulate punctuation restoration as a token-level sequence labeling task and fine-tune ParsBERT to achieve strong performance. Through comparative evaluation, we demonstrate that while large language models can perform punctuation restoration, they suffer from critical limitations: over-correction tendencies that introduce undesired edits beyond punctuation insertion (particularly problematic for speech-to-text pipelines) and substantially higher computational requirements. Our lightweight BERT-based approach achieves a macro-averaged F1 score of 91.33% on our test set while maintaining efficiency suitable for real-time applications. We make our dataset and model publicly available to facilitate future research in Persian NLP and provide a scalable framework applicable to other morphologically rich, low-resource languages.

The Iranic language family includes many underrepresented languages and dialects that remain largely unexplored in modern NLP research. We introduce APARSIN, a multi-variety benchmark covering 14 Iranic languages, dialects, and accents, designed for sentiment analysis and machine translation. The dataset includes both high and low-resource varieties, several of which are endangered, capturing linguistic variation across them. We evaluate a set of instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) on these tasks and analyze their performance across the varieties. Our results highlight substantial performance gaps between standard Persian and other Iranic languages and dialects, demonstrating the need for more inclusive multilingual and dialectally diverse NLP benchmarks.