Shawarma Chats: A Benchmark Dialogue and Evaluation Platter in Egyptian, Maghrebi and Modern Standard Arabic — A Triple-Dialect Feast for Hungry Language Models
Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2025), co-located with EMNLP 2025, Suzhou, China
Presented on , 4 citations on Google Scholar
In short
The paper introduces Shawarma Chats, 30,000 six-turn dialogues grounded in Wikipedia content and split evenly across Modern Standard, Egyptian and Maghrebi Arabic, built with LLM generation, a self-repair loop and native-speaker checks. LoRA fine-tuning six open LLMs (1B to 24B) on it gave consistent gains, especially for models larger than 7B.
Cite
@inproceedings{zeinalipour-etal-2025-shawarma,
title = "Shawarma Chats: A Benchmark Exact Dialogue {\&} Evaluation Platter in {E}gyptian, {M}aghrebi {\&} {M}odern {S}tandard {A}rabic{---}{A} Triple-Dialect Feast for Hungry Language Models",
author = "Zeinalipour, Kamyar and
Saad, Mohamed Zaky and
Attafi, Oumaima and
Maggini, Marco and
Gori, Marco",
editor = "Darwish, Kareem and
Ali, Ahmed and
Abu Farha, Ibrahim and
Touileb, Samia and
Zitouni, Imed and
Abdelali, Ahmed and
Al-Ghamdi, Sharefah and
Alkhereyf, Sakhar and
Zaghouani, Wajdi and
Khalifa, Salam and
AlKhamissi, Badr and
Almatham, Rawan and
Hamed, Injy and
Alyafeai, Zaid and
Alowisheq, Areeb and
Inoue, Go and
Mrini, Khalil and
Alshammari, Waad",
booktitle = "Proceedings of The Third {A}rabic Natural Language Processing Conference",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.arabicnlp-main.39/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.arabicnlp-main.39",
pages = "472--524",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-352-4"
}