Morocco

Named Entity Recognition (NER) models trained on clean text often fail on real-world data containing orthographic noise. Work on NER for Persian is emerging, but it has not yet explored the orthographic robustness of models to perturbations often exhibited in user-generated content. We evaluate ParsBERT, ParsBERT v2.0, and BertNER on a subset of Persian-NER-Dataset-500k after applying eleven different perturbations, including simulated typos, code-switching, and segmentation errors. All models were competitive with each other, but ParsBERT v2.0 consistently displayed the best robustness to perturbations. Code-switching, typos, similar character swaps, segmentation errors, and noisy text all decreased F1 scores, while Latinized numbers increased F1 scores in ParsBERT. Removing diacritics, zero-width non-joiners, and normalizing Yeh/Kaf all did not have an effect on F1. These findings suggest that Persian NER models require improvement for performance on noisy text, and that the Perso-Arabic script introduces unique factors into NER not present in many high-resource languages, such as code-switching and Eastern Arabic numerals. This work creates a foundation for the development of robust Persian NER models and highlights the necessity of evaluating low-resource NER models under challenging and realistic conditions.

EACL 2026

Orthographic Robustness of Persian Named Entity Recognition Models

arabic script

persian

named entity recognition

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
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Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

Hausa Ajami (Hausa written in Arabic script) remains severely under-resourced for computational morphology. We present AjamiMorph, a zero-annotation framework that discovers morphemes through consensus among three unsupervised methods, viz., Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), transition-based boundary detection using Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI), and computational-linguistics-based Distributional Affix Mining (DAM).

Using a Hausa Ajami Bible corpus consisting of 637,414 tokens, AjamiMorph identifies 1,611 high-confidence morphemes, achieving 99.9% coverage. The inventory exhibits a linguistically realistic distribution (66.0% stems, 22.6% suffixes, 11.4% prefixes) and recovers 77.8% of known Hausa affixes. We also report negative results for script-driven Arabic assumptions and LLM-based approaches.

This work provides the first unsupervised morpheme inventory for Hausa Ajami and demonstrates consensus as a robust strategy for zero-resource morphology.

AjamiMorph: Zero-Annotation Morphological Discovery for Hausa Ajami via Multi-Method Consensus

As reported, approximately 6 million people in Iraq and Iran speak Sorani Kurdish, which exhibits substantial regional variation but lacks computational resources for dialect identification. We present the first fine-grained sub-dialect classification system for six Sorani varieties, viz., Sulaymaniyah, Erbil, Iranian Sorani, Ardalani, Babani, and Mukriani.

This investigation combines cross-lingual contextual embeddings (XLM-RoBERTa) with morphological features derived from explicit linguistic rules, including 24 patterns capturing verb prefixes, pronominal clitics, and definite markers. The proposed morphology-augmented XLM-R model is trained on 16,409 sentences without manual annotation and achieves 91.91% accuracy, outperforming pure transformer models (91.79%) and traditional machine-learning baselines (SVM: 86.41%).

Key ablation studies reveal that morphological features act as effective regularizers for geographically proximate dialects.

Morphological Feature Extraction for Fine-Grained Sorani Kurdish Dialect Identification: A Hybrid Transformer-Linguistic Approach

Automatic classification of literary text by historical era can support literary analysis and reveal stylistic evolution. We study this problem for Urdu poetry across three eras, classical, modern, and contemporary. We introduce a new dataset of 10,026 four-line Urdu poetry segments collected from online archives (Rekhta and UrduPoint) and labeled by era. To handle Urdu's script and orthographic variability, we apply standard preprocessing, including Unicode normalization and removal of diacritics and non-Urdu characters. We benchmark a range of approaches, from traditional machine learning classifiers to deep learning models, including four fine-tuned Urdu BERT-style transformers. To assess generalization, we evaluate under two regimes: (i) a standard stratified random split and (ii) a stricter author-disjoint split that ensures poets do not overlap between training and test sets. On the random split, the best traditional models achieve about 70–73% accuracy, suggesting era-related stylistic cues are learnable. However, performance drops to roughly 58–60% under the author-disjoint split, highlighting the difficulty in generalizing across unseen poets and the possibility of overestimating performance via author-specific leakage. Notably, fine-tuned transformers do not surpass simpler TF–IDF-based baselines, indicating that era cues may be subtle and data-limitation for complex models.

From Classical to Contemporary: Evolutionary Analysis & Classification of Urdu Poetry

Sentiment analysis in low-resource languages such as Urdu poses unique challenges due to limited annotated data, morphological complexity, and significant class imbalance in most publicly available datasets. This study addresses these issues through two experimental strategies. First, we explore class imbalance mitigation by using instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic negative sentiment samples in Urdu. This augmentation strategy results in a more balanced dataset, which significantly improves the recall and F1-score for minority class predictions when fine-tuned using a multilingual BERT model. Second, we investigate the effectiveness of translating Urdu text into English and applying sentiment classification through a pre-trained English language model. Comparative evaluation reveals that the translation-based pipeline, using a RoBERTa model fine-tuned for English sentiment classification, achieves superior performance across major metrics. Our results suggest that LLM-based augmentation and cross-lingual transfer via translation both serve as viable approaches to overcome data scarcity and performance limitations in sentiment analysis for low-resource languages. The findings provide a roadmap for scalable, language-agnostic strategies that can be extended to other under-resourced linguistic domains.

Enhancing Urdu Sentiment Classification through Instruction-Tuned LLMs and Cross-Lingual Transfer

Inserting English words, phrases, or sentences while writing or speaking in the Saudi Arabic
dialect has become a widespread phenomenon in Saudi society. This phenomenon is linguistically called code-switching. It remains unclear how current sentiment analysis methods perform on Saudi-English code-switching text. In this paper, we address this gap by conducting the first sentiment analysis study on Saudi-English code-switching text. We present the first Saudi-English Sentiment Analysis Code Switching Dataset (SESA-CSD) and establish baseline results on this dataset. By evaluating multiple state-of-the-art small language models, we achieve improvements over the baseline of 3% to 10% in both accuracy and macro-F1. Among all small language models, XLM-RoBERTa achieved the highest performance,with an accuracy of 95.50% and a macro-F1 of 95.53%. Our findings indicate that multilingual and Arabic small language models, such as XLM-RoBERTa, GigaBERT, and SaudiBERT, consistently outperform bilingual Arabic-English large language models, such as Fanar and ALLaM, across zero-shot and multiple few-shot settings.

Improving on State-of-the-Art Models for Sentiment Analysis on Saudi-English Code-Switching Text

The Arabic-derived scripts contain several languages that face challenges with the limited resources of speech detection, these challenges are worsened by the scarcity of resources and highly complex linguistic challenges. We proposed ( HACS-TL Hausa Ajami Cross-Script Transfer Learning) a brand new transformer-based architecture that focuses on the detection of hate speech within Ajami script. Hausa is a Chadic language which contains over 77 million speakers located in West Africa; it uses two types of scripts: the Latin (Boko) and the Arabic-derived Ajami which creates new computational difficulties. Our method combines scripts of artistically converted linguistics, augmented cross script multi-head attention, and dialect feature extraction to trellis the morphophonological depth of the Hausa. After a thorough examination using stratified cross-validation along with systemically augmented data, HACS-TL obtained a Macro F1 score of 76.09\% which is a significant improvement from the other multilingual baselines (mBERT (69.17 % ) XLM-RoBERTa (73.20 % ) AraBERT (58.63% ) ) HACS-TL outperformed all of the previously stated models. Strong multilingual baselines refer to the other stated models; AraBERT (58.63) XLM-RoBERTa (73.20) mBERT (69.17) HACS-TL 70.73 + 10 % Cross-Script+ (mBERT) 46.73 + 0.9 % Cross-Script + AraBERT. The importance of cross-script attention and learning from transfer sources of resources to languages with limited scripts has proven effective. Our systematic method has aided the advancement of Arabic script homage Hausa and African language resources for the NLP of the Nubians in learning African languages and the intricate Nubian and cross-learning systems from different scripts.

HACS-TL: Cross-Script Transfer Learning for Hausa Ajami Hate Speech Detection Using Transformer-Based Architecture

Large Language Models demonstrate strong safety behavior when user intent is expressed in English, yet their robustness under code switching and transliteration remains insufficiently understood. This paper investigates code switching as a safety failure mode, focusing on Roman Urdu, a widely used transliterated and mixed language form employed in informal and emotionally expressive communication. We introduce the Roman Urdu Adversarial Benchmark, a semantically controlled evaluation set comprising 400 distinct safety-relevant intents, each expressed in three aligned variants: English, mixed Roman Urdu with limited English usage, and purely transliterated Roman Urdu without English words, yielding 1,200 total evaluation inputs. The benchmark spans four critical safety categories: passive suicidal ideation, psychological distress, threat or intimidation, and coercion or emotional manipulation. We conduct a broad comparative evaluation of seven state-of-the-art language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI using recall-based safety metrics. Results reveal consistent degradation in safety detection under Roman Urdu inputs, with particularly pronounced drops for passive suicidal ideation. At the same time, instruction-tuned and reasoning-capable models demonstrate improved robustness, indicating that such failures are not inevitable and motivating transliteration-aware safety alignment methods.

Code-Switching as a Safety Failure Mode in Large Language Models: An Empirical Study of Roman Urdu across English, Mixed, and Transliteration-Only Inputs

Encoder-only transformer models remain widely used for discriminative NLP tasks, yet recent architectural advances have largely focused on English. In this work, we present \textbf{AraModernBERT}, an adaptation of the ModernBERT encoder architecture to Arabic, and study the impact of transtokenized embedding initialization and native long-context modeling up to 8,192 tokens. We show that transtokenization is essential for Arabic language modeling, yielding dramatic improvements in masked language modeling performance compared to non-transtokenized initialization. We further demonstrate that AraModernBERT supports stable and effective long-context modeling, achieving improved intrinsic language modeling performance at extended sequence lengths. Downstream evaluations on Arabic natural language understanding tasks, including inference, offensive language detection, question-question similarity, and named entity recognition, confirm strong transfer to discriminative and sequence labeling settings. Our results highlight practical considerations for adapting modern encoder architectures to Arabic and other languages written in Arabic-derived scripts.

AraModernBERT: Transtokenized Initialization and Long-Context Encoder Modeling for Arabic

Arabic speech recognition systems face distinct challenges due to the language's complex morphology and dialectal variations. Self-supervised models (SSL) like XLS-R have shown promising results, but their size with over than 300 million of parameters, makes fine-tuning computationally expensive. In this work, we present the first comparative study of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), specifically LoRA and DoRA, applied to XLS-R for Arabic ASR. We evaluate on the newly released Common Voice Arabic V24.0 dataset, establishing new benchmarks. Our full fine-tuning achieves state-of-the-art results among XLS-R-based models with 23.03% Word Error Rate (WER). In our experiments, LoRA achieved a 36.10% word error rate (WER) while training just 2% of the model's parameters. DoRA reached 45.20% WER in initial experiments. We analyze the trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, offering practical guidance for developing Arabic ASR systems when computational resources are limited. The models and code are publicly available.

Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Self-Supervised Models for Arabic Speech Recognition

This work presents an evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for English to dialectal Arabic machine translation on the MADAR dataset. We evaluate both translation directions (English to Arabic and vice-versa) on 16 Arabic dialects. Our experiments cover a diverse set of models, including specialized Arabic models (Jais, Nile), multilingual models (Gemma, Command-R, Mistral, Aya), and commercial APIs (GPT-4.1). We employ multiple evaluation metrics: BLEU, CHRF, COMET (both reference-based and reference-less variants) and GEMBA (LLM-as-a-judge), as well as a small-scale manual evaluation, to assess translation quality. We discuss the challenges of automatic MT evaluation, especially in the context of Arabic dialects. We also evaluate the ability of LLMs to classify the dialect used in a text. The study offers insights into the capabilities and limitations of current LLMs for dialectal Arabic machine translation, particularly highlighting the difficulty of handling dialectal diversity.

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