When Similar Means Different: Evaluating LLMs on Arabic--Hebrew Cognates

arXiv:2606.13218 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-06-11 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-06-11

Updated: 2026-08-31

Comments: Accepted to EMNLP 2026

Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/SemCog

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Cognate Identification — 24× in this paper
• Semantic Disambiguation — 22× in this paper
• Accuracy — 15× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 15× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adam — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Semantic Understanding — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Modern Standard Arabic — 2× in this paper
• Adaptation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Aggregation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Annotator Agreement — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Embeddings — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Foundation Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Foundation Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Tokenization — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Aya 23: Open Weight Releases to Further Multilingual Progress
• Large-Scale Machine Translation between Arabic and Hebrew: Available Corpora and Initial Results
• An Arabic-Hebrew parallel corpus of TED talks
• DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report
• Symphonym: Universal Phonetic Embeddings for Cross-Script Toponym Matching
• ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• Phonikud: Overcoming Phonetic Underspecification for Hebrew Text-To-Speech
• GPT-4 Technical Report
• Qwen2.5 Technical Report
• IMPACT: Inflectional Morphology Probes Across Complex Typologies
• Jais and Jais-chat: Arabic-Centric Foundation and Instruction-Tuned Open Generative Large Language Models
• Adapting LLMs to Hebrew: Unveiling DictaLM 2.0 with Enhanced Vocabulary and Instruction Capabilities
• OpenAI GPT-5 System Card
• Multilingual LLMs Struggle to Link Orthography and Semantics in Bilingual Word Processing
• Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size
• Qwen3 Technical Report

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