Alyah ⭐️: Toward Robust Evaluation of Emirati Dialect Capabilities in Arabic LLMs

Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, with hundreds of millions of speakers across more than twenty countries. Despite this global reach, Arabic is not a monolithic language. Modern Standard Arabic coexists with a rich landscape of regional dialects that differ significantly in vocabulary, syntax, phonology, and cultural grounding. These dialects are the primary medium of daily communication, oral storytelling, poetry, and social interaction. However, most existing benchmarks for Arabic large language models focus almost exclusively on Modern Standard Arabic, leaving dialectal Arabic largely under-evaluated and under-represented.

This gap is particularly problematic as large language models increasingly interact with users in informal, culturally grounded, and conversational settings. A model that performs well on formal newswire text may still fail to understand a greeting, an idiomatic expression, or a short anecdote expressed in a local dialect. To address this limitation, our team introduces Alyah الياه (which means North Star ⭐️ in Emirati), an Emirati-centric benchmark designed to assess how well Arabic LLMs capture the linguistic, cultural, and pragmatic aspects of the Emirati dialect.

The Emirati dialect is deeply intertwined with local culture, heritage, and history. It appears in everyday greetings, oral poetry, proverbs, folk narratives, and expressions whose meanings cannot be inferred through literal translation alone. Our benchmark is intentionally designed to probe this depth. Rather than testing surface-level lexical knowledge, it challenges models on their ability to interpret culturally embedded meaning, pragmatic usage, and dialect-specific nuances.

The benchmark covers a wide range of content, including common and uncommon local expressions, culturally grounded greetings, short anecdotes, heritage-related questions, and references to Emirati poetry. The goal is not only to measure correctness, but also to understand where models systematically succeed or fail when confronted with authentic Emirati language use.

Following further development and consolidation, the benchmark has been unified into a single dataset called Alyah. The final benchmark contains 1,173 samples, all collected manually from native Emirati speakers to ensure linguistic authenticity and cultural grounding. This manual curation step was essential to capture expressions, meanings, and usages that are rarely documented in written resources and are difficult to infer from Modern Standard Arabic alone.

Each sample is formulated as a multiple-choice question with four candidate answers, exactly one of which is correct. Large language models were used to synthetically generate the distractor choices, after which they were reviewed to ensure plausibility and semantic closeness to the correct answer. To avoid positional bias during evaluation, the index of the correct answer follows a randomized distribution across the dataset.

Alyah spans a broad spectrum of linguistic and cultural phenomena in the Emirati dialect, ranging from everyday expressions to culturally sensitive and figurative language.

We evaluated a total of 54 language models, comprising 23 base models and 31 instruction-tuned models, spanning several architectural and training paradigms. These include Arabic-native LLMs such as Jais and Allam, multilingual models with strong Arabic support such as Qwen and LLaMA, and adapted or regionally specialized models such as Fanar and AceGPT. For each family, both base and instruction-tuned variants were evaluated in order to understand the impact of alignment and instruction tuning on dialectal performance.

Several trends emerge from the evaluation. Instruction-tuned models generally outperform their base counterparts as shown in the results.