Papers by Sara Shatnawi
Commonsense Reasoning in Arab Culture (2025.acl-long)
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Abdelrahman Sadallah, Junior Cedric Tonga, Khalid Almubarak, Saeed Almheiri, Farah Atif, Chatrine Qwaider, Karima Kadaoui, Sara Shatnawi, Yaser Alesh, Fajri Koto
| Challenge: | Existing studies on commonsense reasoning in Arabic have relied on machine translations that lack cultural depth and introduce anglocentric biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense reasoning dataset in Arabic that covers 13 Arab countries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers 13 countries across the Gulf, Levant, North Africa, and the Nile Valley. |
Alexandria: A Multi-Domain Dialectal Arabic Machine Translation Dataset for Culturally Inclusive and Linguistically Diverse LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Abdellah EL Mekki, Samar M. Magdy, Houdaifa Atou, Ruwa AbuHweidi, Baraah Qawasmeh, Omer Nacar, Thikra Al-hibiri, Razan Saadie, Hamzah A. Alsayadi, Nadia Ghezaiel Hammouda, Alshima Mohammed Alkhazimi, Aya Hamod, Al-Yas Yaqoob Al-Ghafri, Wesam El-Sayed, Asila Ismail al Sharji, Mohamad Ballout, Anas Belfathi, Karim Ghaddar, Serry Sibaee, Alaa Aoun, Aeej Mohammed Aseri, Lina Abureesh, Ahlam Bashiti, Majdal Yousef, Abdulaziz Hafiz, Yehdih Mohamed, Emira Hamedtou, Brakehe Emehah, Rahaf Alhamouri, Youssef Nafea, Aya El Aatar, Walid Al-Dhabyani, Emhemed S. Hamed, Sara Shatnawi, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Khalid Elkhidir, Ashwag Alasmari, Abdurrahman Gerrio, Omar Said Alshahri, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Ismail Berrada, Amir Azad Adli Al-kathiri, Fadi Zaraket, Mustafa Jarrar, Yahya Mohamed EL Hadj, Hassan Alhuzali, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
| Challenge: | Arabic is a highly diglossic language where most daily communication occurs in regional dialects rather than modern standard Arabic (MSA). |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, community-driven, human-translated dataset to bridge this gap . Alexandria covers 13 Arab countries and 11 high-impact domains . it provides unprecedented granularity by associating contributions with city-of-origin metadata . |
| Outcome: | The Alexandria dataset covers 13 Arab countries and 11 high-impact domains . it provides unprecedented granularity by associating contributions with city-of-origin metadata . Alexandria is a training resource and a rigorous benchmark for evaluating MT and LLMs based on the Alexandria dataset . |
ArabicMMLU: Assessing Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Arabic (2024.findings-acl)
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Fajri Koto, Haonan Li, Sara Shatnawi, Jad Doughman, Abdelrahman Sadallah, Aisha Alraeesi, Khalid Almubarak, Zaid Alyafeai, Neha Sengupta, Shady Shehata, Nizar Habash, Preslav Nakov, Timothy Baldwin
| Challenge: | evaluating language models in Arabic remains challenging due to limited datasets . focus has shift to reasoning and knowledge-intensive tasks due to lack of relevant datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ArabicMMLU to evaluate models' understanding of Arabic . they use 40 tasks and 14,575 multiple-choice questions from school exams in different countries . |
| Outcome: | The ArabicMMLU is the first multi-task language understanding benchmark for the Arabic language . it is based on 40 tasks and 14,575 multiple-choice questions in modern standard Arabic . the models are based in different countries across North Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf regions . |
Palm: A Culturally Inclusive and Linguistically Diverse Dataset for Arabic LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdellah El Mekki, Samar Mohamed Magdy, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Omer Nacar, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Reem Abdel-Salam, Hanin Atwany, Youssef Nafea, Abdulfattah Mohammed Yahya, Rahaf Alhamouri, Hamzah A. Alsayadi, Hiba Zayed, Sara Shatnawi, Serry Sibaee, Yasir Ech-chammakhy, Walid Al-Dhabyani, Marwa Mohamed Ali, Imen Jarraya, Ahmed Oumar El-Shangiti, Aisha Alraeesi, Mohammed Anwar AL-Ghrawi, Abdulrahman S. Al-Batati, Elgizouli Mohamed, Noha Taha Elgindi, Muhammed Saeed, Houdaifa Atou, Issam Ait Yahia, Abdelhak Bouayad, Mohammed Machrouh, Amal Makouar, Dania Alkawi, Mukhtar Mohamed, Safaa Taher Abdelfadil, Amine Ziad Ounnoughene, Anfel Rouabhia, Rwaa Assi, Ahmed Sorkatti, Mohamedou Cheikh Tourad, Anis Koubaa, Ismail Berrada, Mustafa Jarrar, Shady Shehata, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
| Challenge: | a year-long community-driven project covering all 22 Arab countries evaluates the cultural and dialectal capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a project to evaluate the cultural and dialectal capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The project evaluates the cultural and dialectal capabilities of several frontier LLMs. |
Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition (2024.emnlp-main)
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Bashar Talafha, Karima Kadaoui, Samar Magdy, Mariem Habiboullah, Chafei Chafei, Ahmed El-Shangiti, Hiba Zayed, Mohamedou Tourad, Rahaf Alhamouri, Rwaa Assi, Aisha Alraeesi, Hour Mohamed, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Abdellah El Mekki, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Benelhadj Saadia, Hamzah Alsayadi, Walid Al-Dhabyani, Sara Shatnawi, Yasir Ech-chammakhy, Amal Makouar, Yousra Berrachedi, Mustafa Jarrar, Shady Shehata, Ismail Berrada, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
| Challenge: | despite recent advances in speech processing, the majority of world languages and dialects remain uncovered. |
| Approach: | They propose to collect and transcribe a new Arabic dataset for eight dialects . they also develop strong baselines exploiting the new dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers eight Arabic dialects, including Algerian, Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, and Yemeni. |
Automatic Restoration of Diacritics for Speech Data Sets (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-based diacritic restoration models have high diacritical error rates when applied to speech data . a recent study shows that the lack of diacritized text can cause poor performance for text restoration models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Arabic scripts as input for automatic diacritic restoration models . they use a pre-trained model to produce rough diacritized Arabic transcripts for the model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework consistently improves diacritic restoration performance compared to baseline models. |