China

We present Octopus, a first family of modular speech-language models designed for Arabic-English ASR, dialect identification, and speech translation. Built on Whisper-V3 and enhanced with large language models like ALLaM, LLaMA, and DeepSeek, Octopus bridges speech and text through a lightweight projection layer and Q-Former. To broaden its scope beyond speech, Octopus integrates BEATs, a general-purpose audio encoder allowing it to understand both linguistic and acoustic events. Despite its simplicity, this dual-encoder design supports robust performance across multilingual and code-switched scenarios. We also introduce TinyOctopus, a distilled variant using smaller models (Distil-Whisper + LLaMA3-1B / DeepSeek-1.5B), achieving competitive results with just a fraction of the parameters. Fine-tuning on synthetic code-switched data further boosts its performance. Octopus demonstrates the power of compact, extensible architectures in Arabic-centric speech modeling and sets the stage for unified multilingual audio-language understanding.

EMNLP 2025

Octopus: Towards Building the Arabic Speech LLM Suite

workshop paper

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

[**Link to Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1johU5QqVVYO4RfH7QcIORr7qrVBdzdwC/view?usp=sharing)





<br>

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

In this paper, we present the Arabic Multimodal Crawl (AMCrawl), the first native-based Arabic multimodal dataset to our knowledge, derived from the Common Crawl corpus and rigorously filtered for quality and safety. Image-text pair datasets are the standard choice for pretraining multimodal large language models. However, they are often derived from image alt-text metadata, which is typically brief and context-poor, disconnecting images from their broader meaning. Although significant advances have been made in building interleaved image-text datasets for English, such as the OBELICS dataset, a substantial gap remains for native Arabic content. Our processing covered 8.6 million Arabic web pages, yielding 5.8 million associated images and 1.3 billion text tokens. The final dataset includes interleaved image-text documents and question-answer pairs, featuring 2.8 million high-quality interleaved documents and 5 million QA pairs. Alongside the dataset, we release the complete pipeline and code, ensuring reproducibility and encouraging further research and development. To demonstrate the effectiveness of AMCrawl, we introduce a publicly available native Arabic Vision Language model, trained with 13 billion parameters. These models achieve competitive results when benchmarked against publicly available datasets. AMCrawl bridges a critical gap in Arabic multimodal resources, providing a robust foundation for developing Arabic multimodal large language models and fostering advancements in this underrepresented area. Code: github.com/shahad-aboukozzana/AMCrawl

AMCrawl: An Arabic Web-Scale Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents and Image-Text Pairs

Conversational question-answering (CQA) plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between human language and machine understanding, enabling more natural and interactive interactions with AI systems. In this work, we present the first results on open-domain Arabic CQA using deep learning. We introduce AraQReCC, a large-scale Arabic CQA dataset containing 9K conversations with 62K question-answer pairs, created by translating a subset of the QReCC dataset. To ensure data quality, we used COMET-based filtering and manual ratings from large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 and LLaMA, selecting conversations with COMET scores, along with LLM ratings of 4 or more. AraQReCC facilitates advanced research in Arabic CQA, improving clarity and relevance through question rewriting. We applied AraT5 for question rewriting and used BM25 and Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) for passage retrieval. AraT5 is also used for question answering, completing the end-to-end system. Our experiments show that the best performance is achieved with DPR, attaining an F1 score of 21.51\% on the test set. While this falls short of the human upper bound of 40.22\%, it underscores the importance of question rewriting and quality-controlled data in enhancing system performance.

Open-domain Arabic Conversational Question Answering with Question Rewriting

Classical Arabic represents a significant era that encompasses the golden age of Arab culture, philosophy, and scientific literature. With a broad consensus on the importance of translating these literatures to enrich knowledge dissemination across communities, the advent of large language models (LLMs) and translation systems offers promising tools to facilitate this goal. However, we have identified a scarcity of translation datasets in Classical Arabic, which are often limited in scope and topics, hindering the development of high-quality translation systems. In response, we present the ATHAR dataset, which comprises 66,000 high-quality classical Arabic to English translation samples that cover a wide array of topics including science, culture, and philosophy. Furthermore, we assess the performance of current state-of-the-art LLMs under various settings, concluding that there is a need for such datasets in current systems. Our findings highlight how models can benefit from fine-tuning or incorporating this dataset into their pretraining pipelines. The dataset is publicly available on the HuggingFace Data Hub: https://huggingface.co/datasets/mohamed-khalil/ATHAR

ATHAR: A High-Quality and Diverse Dataset for Classical Arabic to English Translation

For effective use in specific countries, Large Language Models (LLMs) need a strong grasp of local culture and core knowledge to ensure socially appropriate, context-aware, and factually correct responses. Existing Arabic and Saudi benchmarks are limited, focusing mainly on dialects or lifestyle, with little attention to deeper cultural or domain-specific alignment from authoritative sources. To address this gap and the challenge LLMs face with non-Western cultural nuance, this study introduces the Saudi-Alignment Benchmark. It consists of 874 manually curated questions across two core cultural dimensions: Saudi Cultural and Ethical Norms, and Saudi Domain Knowledge. These questions span multiple subcategories and use three formats to assess different goals with verified sources. Our evaluation reveals significant variance in LLM alignment. GPT-4 achieved the highest overall accuracy (83.3%), followed by ALLaM-7B (81.8%) and Llama-3.3-70B (81.6%), whereas Jais-30B exhibited a pronounced shortfall at 21.9%. Furthermore, multilingual LLMs excelled in norms; ALLaM-7B in domain knowledge. Considering the effect of question format, LLMs generally excelled in selected-response formats but showed weaker results on generative tasks, indicating that recognition-based benchmarks alone may overestimate cultural and contextual alignment. These findings highlight the need for tailored benchmarks and reveal LLMs’ limitations in achieving cultural grounding, particularly in underrepresented contexts like Saudi Arabia.

Saudi-Alignment Benchmark: Assessing LLMs Alignment with Cultural Norms and Domain Knowledge in the Saudi Context

Information Extraction tasks such as Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction are often developed using diverse tagsets and annotation guidelines. This presents major challenges for model generalization, cross-dataset evaluation, tool interoperability, and broader industry adoption. 
To address these issues, we propose an information extraction ontology, WojoodOntology, which covers a wide range of named entity types and relations. WojoodOntology serves as a semantic mediation framework that facilitates alignment across heterogeneous tagsets and annotation guidelines. We propose two ontology-based mapping methods: (i) as a set of mapping rules for uni-directional tagset alignment; and (ii) as ontology-based prompting, which incorporates the ontology concepts directly into prompts, enabling large language models (LLMs) to perform more effective and bi-directional mappings. Our experiments show a 15% improvement in out-of-domain mapping accuracy when using ontology-based prompting compared to rule-based methods. Furthermore, WojoodOntology is aligned with Schema.org and Wikidata, enabling interoperability with knowledge graphs and facilitating broader industry adoption. The WojoodOntology is open source and available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/wojood.

InExOntology - Ontology-Driven LLM Prompting for Unified Information Extraction Tasks

This paper presents a methodology for inserting phrases in Arabic poems to conform to a specific rhythm using ByT5, a byte-level multilingual transformer-based model. Our work discusses a rule-based grapheme-to-beat transformation tailored for extracting the rhythm from fully diacritized Arabic script. Our approach employs a conditional denoising objective to fine-tune ByT5, where the model reconstructs masked words to match a target rhythm. We adopt a curriculum learning strategy, pre-training on a general Arabic dataset before fine-tuning on poetic dataset, and explore cross-lingual transfer from English to Arabic. Experimental results demonstrate that our models achieve high rhythmic alignment while maintaining semantic coherence. The proposed model has the potential to be used in co-creative applications in the process of composing classical Arabic poems.

Tahḏīb: A Rhythm-Aware Phrase Insertion for Classical Arabic Poetry Composition

Video-to-text and text-to-video retrieval are dominated by English benchmarks. We introduce a three-stage framework, AutoArabic, utilizing state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to translate non-Arabic benchmarks into Modern Standard Arabic, reducing the manual revision required by nearly fourfold. Applying the framework to DiDeMo, a video retrieval benchmark produces DiDeMo-AR, an Arabic variant with 40,144 fluent Arabic descriptions. Our experiments indicate that Arabic localization preserves benchmark difficulty. We evaluate three post-editing budgets (zero/ flagged-only/ full) and find that performance improves monotonically with more post-editing, while the raw LLM output (zero-budget) remains usable.

AutoArabic: A Three-Stage Framework for Localizing Video-Text Retrieval Benchmarks

Arabic Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) remains challenging due to the language’s rich morphology, polysemy, and lack of large annotated resources. This study benchmarks four generative Large Language Models (LLMs)—GPT-4o, LLaMA 3.1-8B, Qwen 2.5-7B, and Gemma 2-9B—on two public Arabic WSD datasets under both zero-shot and fine-tuned conditions. Results show that GPT-4o achieves the strongest zero-shot performance (79 % accuracy, 66% macro-F1), while parameter-efficient fine-tuning of open models via LoRA closes and surpasses this gap. Qwen 2.5-7B attains 90.77 % accuracy and 83.98 % F1 on Dataset A, and LLaMA 3.1-8B reaches 88.51 % accuracy and 69.41 % F1 on Dataset B. The findings demonstrate that medium-sized open LLMs can serve as competitive, reproducible baselines for Arabic sense-level understanding when modest supervision is applied.

Zero-Shot and Fine-Tuned Evaluation of Generative LLMs for Arabic Word Sense Disambiguation

Tool calling is a critical capability that allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with external systems, significantly expanding their utility. However, research and resources for tool calling are predominantly English-centric, leaving a gap in our understanding of how to enable this functionality for other languages, such as Arabic. This paper investigates three key research questions: (1) the necessity of in-language (Arabic) tool-calling data versus relying on cross-lingual transfer, (2) the effect of general-purpose instruction tuning on tool-calling performance, and (3) the value of fine-tuning on specific, high-priority tools. To address these questions, we conduct extensive experiments using base and post-trained variants of an open-weight Arabic LLM. To enable this study, we bridge the resource gap by translating and adapting two open-source tool-calling datasets into Arabic. Our findings provide crucial insights into the optimal strategies for developing robust tool-augmented agents for Arabic.

Tool Calling for Arabic LLMs: Data Strategies and Instruction Tuning

North African Arabic dialects pose major NLP challenges due to high lexical variation, script diversity (Arabic/Latin), and frequent French code-switching. We introduce a phoneme-based normalization that harmonizes surface forms across varieties by mapping both Arabic and French into a simplified Latin representation.

We then pretrain BERT models exclusively on normalized Modern Standard Arabic and French, without using any dialectal data. The resulting models are evaluated on Named Entity Recognition (DzNER, DarNER, WikiFANE) and sentiment classification (TwiFil).

Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several North African benchmarks and shows strong zero-shot generalization from MSA to Algerian NER (Ar_20k > dialect-pretrained models). Results demonstrate that standard-only pretraining with normalization is a viable and scalable solution for supporting underserved Arabic dialects.

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AMCrawl: An Arabic Web-Scale Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents and Image-Text Pairs

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Next from EMNLP 2025

AMCrawl: An Arabic Web-Scale Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents and Image-Text Pairs

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads