Beyond Fluency: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating Saudi Dialect and Cultural Competence in Large Language Models
Large language models are increasingly deployed in Arabic-speaking markets, yet standard benchmarks overwhelmingly reward Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) fluency while leaving dialectal and culturally grounded competence unmeasured. This gap is consequential: everyday Arabic is largely dialectal, and dialect encodes social meaning that MSA-centric evaluation cannot capture. We present a rubric-based benchmark for the Saudi dialect, comprising 31 expert-authored prompts spanning idiomatic, pragmatic, lexical, and culturally-embedded phenomena, each paired with an expert-established ground truth. Our methodology separates evaluation into a model-agnostic phase, in which atomic, MECE positive c...
| Authors | Ghassan Al-Sumaidaee, Sajjad Abdoli, Ahmed Rashad et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 30 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 August 2026 |
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