Salem Lahlou
2026
ArabicDialectHub: A Cross-Dialectal Arabic Learning Resource and Platform
Salem Lahlou
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on NLP for Languages Using Arabic Script
Salem Lahlou
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on NLP for Languages Using Arabic Script
We present ArabicDialectHub, a cross-dialectal Arabic learning resource comprising 552 phrases across six varieties (Moroccan Darija, Lebanese, Syrian, Emirati, Saudi, and MSA) and an interactive web platform. Phrases were generated using LLMs and validated by five native speakers, stratified by difficulty, and organized thematically. The open-source platform provides translation exploration, adaptive quizzing with algorithmic distractor generation, cloud-synchronized progress tracking, and cultural context. Both the dataset and complete platform source code are released under MIT license. Platform: https://arabic-dialect-hub.netlify.app.
Communication Enables Cooperation in LLM Agents: A Comparison with Curriculum-Based Approaches
Hachem Madmoun | Salem Lahlou
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Hachem Madmoun | Salem Lahlou
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Eliciting cooperation in multi-agent LLM systems is critical for AI alignment. We investigate two approaches: direct communication and curriculum learning. In a 4-player Stag Hunt, a one-word "cheap talk" channel increases cooperation from 0% to 48.3%, demonstrating communication as a robust coordination mechanism. In contrast, we find that curriculum learning is highly sensitive to design choices: our pedagogical curriculum through progressively complex games reduced agent payoffs by 27.4% in an Iterated Public Goods Game with Punishment. Qualitative analysis reveals that curricula emphasizing defection-equilibrium games can induce "learned pessimism" in agents. These findings suggest that for coordination problems, simple communication protocols may be more reliable than experience-based training, and that curriculum design for social dilemmas requires careful attention to the strategic lessons embedded in game sequences.
SD-E2: Semantic Exploration for Reasoning Under Token Budgets
Kshitij Mishra | Nils Lukas | Salem Lahlou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Kshitij Mishra | Nils Lukas | Salem Lahlou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
2025
PORT: Preference Optimization on Reasoning Traces
Salem Lahlou | Abdalgader Abubaker | Hakim Hacid
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Salem Lahlou | Abdalgader Abubaker | Hakim Hacid
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Preference optimization methods have been successfully applied to improve not only the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values, but also specific natural language tasks such as summarization and stylistic continuations. This paper proposes using preference optimization methods on Chain-of-Thought steps in order to improve the mathematical reasoning performances of language models. While the chosen answers are obtained from datasets that include reasoning traces, we propose two complementary schemes for generating rejected answers: weak LLM prompting, and digit corruption. Our approach leads to increased accuracy on the GSM8K and AQuA-RAT mathematical reasoning benchmarks for Falcon2-11B and Mistral-7B. Additionally, the improved abilities transfer to non-mathematical tasks, including the ARC benchmark and symbolic reasoning challenges. For example, our method can lead to up to relative 8.47 and 18.73 increases in accuracy on the GSM8K and AQuA benchmarks respectively, without any extra annotations. This work suggests that the path towards better language reasoning abilities goes through spending resources on creating high-quality datasets of reasoning traces.