_version_ 1866915417691258880
author Al-Matham, Rawan
Darwish, Kareem
Al-Rasheed, Raghad
Alshammari, Waad
Alhoshan, Muneera
Almazrua, Amal
Wazrah, Asma Al
Alheraki, Mais
Alam, Firoj
Nakov, Preslav
Alzahrani, Norah
alBilali, Eman
Habash, Nizar
El-Sheikh, Abdelrahman
Elmallah, Muhammad
Li, Haonan
Mubarak, Hamdy
Anwar, Mohamed
Alyafeai, Zaid
Abdelali, Ahmed
Altwairesh, Nora
Hasanain, Maram
Thubaity, Abdulmohsen Al
Shehata, Shady
Alhafni, Bashar
Hamed, Injy
Inoue, Go
Elmadani, Khalid
Obeid, Ossama
Haouari, Fatima
Elsayed, Tamer
Alghamdi, Emad
Almubarak, Khalid
Alshahrani, Saied
Aljarrah, Ola
Alajlan, Safa
Alshaqarawi, Areej
Alshihri, Maryam
Alghurabi, Sultana
Alzeghayer, Atikah
Altamimi, Afrah
Alfaifi, Abdullah
AlOsaimy, Abdulrahman
author_facet Al-Matham, Rawan
Darwish, Kareem
Al-Rasheed, Raghad
Alshammari, Waad
Alhoshan, Muneera
Almazrua, Amal
Wazrah, Asma Al
Alheraki, Mais
Alam, Firoj
Nakov, Preslav
Alzahrani, Norah
alBilali, Eman
Habash, Nizar
El-Sheikh, Abdelrahman
Elmallah, Muhammad
Li, Haonan
Mubarak, Hamdy
Anwar, Mohamed
Alyafeai, Zaid
Abdelali, Ahmed
Altwairesh, Nora
Hasanain, Maram
Thubaity, Abdulmohsen Al
Shehata, Shady
Alhafni, Bashar
Hamed, Injy
Inoue, Go
Elmadani, Khalid
Obeid, Ossama
Haouari, Fatima
Elsayed, Tamer
Alghamdi, Emad
Almubarak, Khalid
Alshahrani, Saied
Aljarrah, Ola
Alajlan, Safa
Alshaqarawi, Areej
Alshihri, Maryam
Alghurabi, Sultana
Alzeghayer, Atikah
Altamimi, Afrah
Alfaifi, Abdullah
AlOsaimy, Abdulrahman
contents The impressive advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in English has not been matched across all languages. In particular, LLM performance in Arabic lags behind, due to data scarcity, linguistic diversity of Arabic and its dialects, morphological complexity, etc. Progress is further hindered by the quality of Arabic benchmarks, which typically rely on static, publicly available data, lack comprehensive task coverage, or do not provide dedicated platforms with blind test sets. This makes it challenging to measure actual progress and to mitigate data contamination. Here, we aim to bridge these gaps. In particular, we introduce BALSAM, a comprehensive, community-driven benchmark aimed at advancing Arabic LLM development and evaluation. It includes 78 NLP tasks from 14 broad categories, with 52K examples divided into 37K test and 15K development, and a centralized, transparent platform for blind evaluation. We envision BALSAM as a unifying platform that sets standards and promotes collaborative research to advance Arabic LLM capabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_22603
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BALSAM: A Platform for Benchmarking Arabic Large Language Models
Al-Matham, Rawan
Darwish, Kareem
Al-Rasheed, Raghad
Alshammari, Waad
Alhoshan, Muneera
Almazrua, Amal
Wazrah, Asma Al
Alheraki, Mais
Alam, Firoj
Nakov, Preslav
Alzahrani, Norah
alBilali, Eman
Habash, Nizar
El-Sheikh, Abdelrahman
Elmallah, Muhammad
Li, Haonan
Mubarak, Hamdy
Anwar, Mohamed
Alyafeai, Zaid
Abdelali, Ahmed
Altwairesh, Nora
Hasanain, Maram
Thubaity, Abdulmohsen Al
Shehata, Shady
Alhafni, Bashar
Hamed, Injy
Inoue, Go
Elmadani, Khalid
Obeid, Ossama
Haouari, Fatima
Elsayed, Tamer
Alghamdi, Emad
Almubarak, Khalid
Alshahrani, Saied
Aljarrah, Ola
Alajlan, Safa
Alshaqarawi, Areej
Alshihri, Maryam
Alghurabi, Sultana
Alzeghayer, Atikah
Altamimi, Afrah
Alfaifi, Abdullah
AlOsaimy, Abdulrahman
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The impressive advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in English has not been matched across all languages. In particular, LLM performance in Arabic lags behind, due to data scarcity, linguistic diversity of Arabic and its dialects, morphological complexity, etc. Progress is further hindered by the quality of Arabic benchmarks, which typically rely on static, publicly available data, lack comprehensive task coverage, or do not provide dedicated platforms with blind test sets. This makes it challenging to measure actual progress and to mitigate data contamination. Here, we aim to bridge these gaps. In particular, we introduce BALSAM, a comprehensive, community-driven benchmark aimed at advancing Arabic LLM development and evaluation. It includes 78 NLP tasks from 14 broad categories, with 52K examples divided into 37K test and 15K development, and a centralized, transparent platform for blind evaluation. We envision BALSAM as a unifying platform that sets standards and promotes collaborative research to advance Arabic LLM capabilities.
title BALSAM: A Platform for Benchmarking Arabic Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22603