Some Dialects Are More Equal Than Others: Non-Prestigious Arabic Dialectal Bias in LLMs
Previous work on Egyptian Arabic in NLP has focused largely on the prestigious Cairene Egyptian Arabic (CEA) dialect, resulting in a lack of representation for the less prestigious Sa'idi Egyptian Arabic (SEA) dialect both in LLM and resource development. Does this lack of representation influence an LLM's view of the acceptability of SEA (upstream), and does an upstream bias against SEA lead to worse performance (downstream)? We investigate the upstream effect of SEA dialectal features on LLM preferences in a Targeted Syntactic Evaluation (TSE) task which reveals a significant bias against SEA across multiple LLMs. We then analyze the effect of these same features on downstream model per...
| Authors | Mai Mohamed Eida, Ryan Dolan, Paul de Nijs et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 21 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 September 2026 |
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