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Mai Mohamed Eida

Publications and source records attributed to Mai Mohamed Eida.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

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 performance on MMLU benchmarks and show that models experience a degradation in performance when presented with SEA. This work highlights the need for further exploration on how sub-dialectal variation impacts language technologies.

cs.CL↗

From Tables to Quantified Statements: Evaluating LLM Inference Generation through Executable Verification

LLMs can generate fluent descriptions from tables, but their outputs may remain logically unsupported by the structured data. We introduce STAT-TO-TEXT, a controlled task in which LLMs generate quantified natural language inferences from statistical tables using quantified constructions such as all, some, no, and most. To evaluate these inferences, we use an LLM generated Python checker code which when executed verifies the corresponding truth conditions against the table. We compare four open-weight LLMs across model families and scales, evaluating faithfulness, logical accuracy, table coverage, and diversity. Our results show that model scale and family matter, with the largest model (GPT-OSS-120B) consistently producing the most faithful inferences without sacrificing greater table coverage and quantifier diversity, as opposed to smaller models. These findings are supported by human annotation, which shows that the automated checker closely aligns with human judgments.

cs.CL↗

LLMs Learn Constructions That Humans Do Not Know

This paper investigates false positive constructions: grammatical structures which an LLM hallucinates as distinct constructions but which human introspection does not support. Both a behavioural probing task using contextual embeddings and a meta-linguistic probing task using prompts are included, allowing us to distinguish between implicit and explicit linguistic knowledge. Both methods reveal that models do indeed hallucinate constructions. We then simulate hypothesis testing to determine what would have happened if a linguist had falsely hypothesized that these hallucinated constructions do exist. The high accuracy obtained shows that such false hypotheses would have been overwhelmingly confirmed. This suggests that construction probing methods suffer from a confirmation bias and raises the issue of what unknown and incorrect syntactic knowledge these models also possess.

cs.CL↗