China

Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently reflect the vast data distributions they encounter during their pre-training phase. As this data is predominantly sourced from the web, there is a high chance it will be skewed towards high-resourced languages and cultures, such as those of the West. Consequently, LLMs often exhibit a diminished understanding of certain communities, a gap that is particularly evident in their knowledge of Arabic and Islamic cultures. This issue becomes even more pronounced with increasingly under-represented topics. To address this critical challenge, we introduce PalmX 2025, the first shared task designed to benchmark the cultural competence of LLMs in these specific domains. The task is composed of two subtasks featuring multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): General Arabic Culture and General Islamic Culture. These subtasks cover a wide range of topics, including traditions, food, history, religious practices, and language expressions from across 22 Arab countries. The initiative drew considerable interest, with 26 teams registering for Subtask 1 and 19 for Subtask 2, culminating in nine and six valid submissions, respectively. Our findings reveal that task-specific fine-tuning substantially boosts performance over baseline models. The top-performing systems achieved an accuracy of 72.15% on cultural questions and 84.22% on Islamic knowledge. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning emerged as the predominant and most effective approach among participants, while the utility of data augmentation was found to be domain-dependent.

EMNLP 2025

PalmX 2025: The First Shared Task on Benchmarking LLMs on Arabic and Islamic Culture

islamic culture

cultural competence

arabic culture

large language models

benchmark

fine-tuning

## 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*





<br>

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

workshop paper

This paper provides a comprehensive overview
of the QIAS 2025 shared task, organized as
part of the ArabicNLP 2025 conference and
co­located with EMNLP 2025. The task was
designed for the evaluation of large language
models in the complex domains of religious and
legal reasoning. It comprises two subtasks: (1)
Islamic Inheritance Reasoning, requiring models to compute inheritance shares according to
Islamic jurisprudence, and (2) Islamic Knowledge Assessment, which covers a range of traditional Islamic disciplines. Both subtasks were
structured as multiple­choice question answering challenges, with questions stratified by varying difficulty levels. The shared task attracted
significant interest, with 44 teams participating in the development phase, from which 18
teams advanced to the final test phase. Of these,
6 teams submitted entries for both subtasks, 8
for Task 1 only, and two for Task 2 only. Ultimately, 16 teams submitted system description
papers. Herein, we detail the task’s motivation,
dataset construction, evaluation protocol, and
present a summary of the participating systems
and their results.

QIAS 2025: Overview of the Shared Task on Islamic Inheritance Reasoning and Knowledge Assessment

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has emerged as a significant research problem in natural language processing, offering valuable tools to support educators in assessing student writing. Motivated by the growing need for reliable Arabic AES systems, we organized the first shared Task for Arabic Quality Evaluation of Essays in Multi-dimensions (TAQEEM) held at the ArabicNLP 2025 conference. TAQEEM 2025 includes two subtasks: Task A on holistic scoring and Task B on trait-specific scoring. It introduces a new (and first of its kind) dataset of 1,265 Arabic essays, annotated with holistic and trait-specific scores, including relevance, organization, vocabulary, style, development, mechanics, and grammar. The main goal of TAQEEM is to address the scarcity of standardized benchmarks and high-quality resources in Arabic AES. TAQEEM 2025 attracted 11 registered teams for Task A and 10 for Task B, with a total of 5 teams, across both tasks, submitting system runs for evaluation. This paper presents an overview of the task, outlines the approaches employed, and discusses the results of the participating teams.


TAQEEM 2025: Overview of The First Shared Task for Arabic Quality Evaluation of Essays in Multi-dimensions

Navigating the complexities of Arabic read ability prediction requires addressing the language’s rich morphology and structural diversity. In the BAREC Shared Task 2025, we participated in all tracks using a stacked ensemble meta learning framework. Our approach combined seven fine-tuned transformer, whose outputs fed into a meta classifier trained on multiple features, including individual predictions, their average, and the average top prediction probabilities. On the blind test set, our ensemble achieved a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) of 86.4%, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating diverse transformer encoders for fine grained Arabic readability classification and the potential of meta learning in morphologically rich contexts.

AMAR at BAREC Shared Task 2025: Arabic Meta-learner for Assessing Readability

This work presents a hybrid approach to Arabic sentence-level readability assessment for the BAREC 2025 Shared Task (Strict Track). Building on transformer-based architectures, I integrate 51 handcrafted linguistic features 0 covering morphological, syntactic, lexical, and conceptual dimensions- into a hybrid model that combines transformer contextual embeddings with dense feature representations.
The best-performing model, MARBERT, achieved a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) of 80.95% on the test set and 83.1% on the blind leaderboard, highlighting the potential of combining linguistic indicators with deep contextual features for fine-grained readability classification across 19 levels.

Noor at BAREC Shared Task 2025: A Hybrid Transformer-Feature Architecture for Sentence-level Readability Assessment

We present a visual-language approach to Arabic readability assessment using the PIXEL Vision Transformer, which processes rendered text as images to bypass tokenization challenges. Our system participated in the BAREC 2025 Shared Task (Sentence-level Strict track). We evaluate orthographic variants (normalization, diacritization, transliteration) and morphological segmentation with different visual boundary markers. Results show that diacritization provides useful visual cues for disambiguation, morphological segmentation improves over word-level processing, and transliterated scripts outperform native Arabic script. Our approach demonstrates the potential of visual processing for readability assessment in complex languages and writing systems.

Pixels at BAREC Shared Task 2025: Visual Arabic Readability Assessment

We presents HUMAIN’s submission to the IslamicEval 2025 Shared Task 1, addressing hallucination detection and correction in Quranic and Hadith LLM-generated content. Our three-stage pipeline covers: (1) Span Detection via sequence-to-sequence annotation using TANL-style markup, (2) Validation with retrieval-based similarity and substring matching against reference corpora, and (3) Correction through exact matching, LCS alignment, and semantic re-ranking. This work presents a multi-stage LLM-based pipeline for Islamic content verification.

HUMAIN at IslamicEval 2025 Shared Task 1: A Three-Stage LLM-Based Pipeline for Detecting and Correcting Hallucinations in Quran and Hadith

We present our systems for the NADI 2025 shared task on multidialectal Arabic speech processing, participating in both spoken dialect identification (ADI) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) subtasks. Working under data constraints by using only the provided shared task resources for dialect adaptation, we explore effective model adaptation strategies for dialectal Arabic speech. For ADI, we fine-tune w2v-BERT 2.0 and employ voice conversion as data augmentation, improving accuracy from 68.71\% to 76.40\% on a blind cross-domain test set. For ASR, we develop two complementary approaches: (1) a CTC-based model pre-trained on public Arabic speech data, and (2) Whisper-based models using two-stage fine-tuning. Our experiments show that while dialect-centric CTC models exhibit better zero-shot dialectal performance (58.89 vs 93.90 WER), Whisper achieves better performance after dialect-specific adaptation, which reduces WER from 93.89 to 39.78 WER. We also demonstrate that using character error rate (CER) as a validation criterion provides practical benefits with minimal performance trade-offs. Despite using no external resources for dialect adaptation beyond the shared task data, our systems ranked second in ADI and third in ASR, demonstrating that careful adaptation strategies can overcome data constraints in dialectal speech processing.

Saarland-Groningen at NADI 2025 Shared Task: Effective Dialectal Arabic Speech Processing under Data Constraints

In this paper, we report our participation to the PalmX cultural evaluation shared task. Our system, CultranAI, focused on data augmentation and LoRA fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) for Arabic cultural knowledge representation. We benchmarked several LLMs to identify the best-performing model for the task. In addition to utilizing the PalmX dataset, we augmented it by incorporating the Palm dataset and curated a new dataset of over 22K culturally grounded multiple-choice questions (MCQs). Our experiments showed that the Fanar-1-9B-Instruct model achieved the highest performance. We fine-tuned this model on the combined augmented dataset of 22K+ MCQs. On the blind test set, our submitted system ranked 5th with an accuracy of 70.50%, while on the PalmX development set, it achieved an accuracy of 84.1%.

CultranAI at PalmX 2025: Data Augmentation for Cultural Knowledge Representation

Cultural and religious cues are essential
for understanding; absence in LLMs → skewed outputs and unfair
outcomes.
Limited evaluation: Existing benchmarks rarely probe
culture-aware or Islam-centric competencies.

AYA at PalmX 2025: Modeling Cultural and Islamic Knowledge in LLMs

This paper presents our system for Subtask 1: Islamic Inheritance Reasoning in the QIAS 2025 Shared Task, which evaluates large language models (LLMs) on ʿilm al-mawārīth (the Islamic science of inheritance) using a benchmark of Arabic multiple-choice questions (MCQs) derived from expert-reviewed fatwas. We explore static and dynamic few-shot prompting, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) using a large fatwa corpus, and a progressive n-gram overlap retrieval method. The n-gram method is employed both to select the top five most similar MCQs for dynamic prompting and to retrieve the most relevant fatwa answers as additional context during inference. We evaluate both proprietary and open-source LLMs individually and in ensemble configurations. Results show that dynamic prompting and RAG consistently improve accuracy across models, with our best-performing model, Gemini, achieving 62.26% accuracy on the test set.

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