Scale and Coverage
Alexandria comprises 34,488 conversations and 107,631 turns, spanning 13 Arab countries and 11 high-impact social domains. It features city-level grounding and rich multi-turn conversational context.
Paper and Dataset
Alexandria is a community-built parallel dataset of English and dialectal Arabic conversations across high social-impact domains, featuring human-translated and human-revised content designed for culturally grounded Arabic MT, natural code-switching, and inclusive gender directions (male and female), while capturing diverse scenarios with specific personas and roles.
Paper Summary
Alexandria comprises 34,488 conversations and 107,631 turns, spanning 13 Arab countries and 11 high-impact social domains. It features city-level grounding and rich multi-turn conversational context.
Alexandria’s conversations are enriched with metadata for city-level dialects, persona roles, and speaker-addressee gender, supporting both context- and gender-aware evaluation.
The Alexandria Dataset was developed in two human-centric phases. In the first phase, participants translated the source data from English into specific Arabic dialects. This was followed by a review and revision phase, where 31.6% of the turns were modified.
Alexandria features metadata for city-level varieties and gender-specific interactions, specifically female-to-male, male-to-female, male-to-male, and female-to-female. To ensure stylistic accuracy, registers were adapted based on the scenario and persona, enabling a context-aware evaluation that reflects natural code-switching and social dynamics.
The paper evaluates 24 Arabic-capable LLMs under turn-level, context-level, and conversation-level prompting with metadata-aware inputs, and reports spBLEU and chrF++ for automatic assessment.
Results show a strong directional asymmetry: dialect-to-English is easier than English-to-dialect. Human evaluation reports high gender adherence, while dialectness remains a major challenge for many systems.
Dataset Stats
107,631
Total human-translated English-to-dialect turns
13
Arab countries
11
Domains
4
Regional groups: Levant, Gulf, Nile, and Maghreb
Swipe horizontally in the table to view all countries and totals.
| Domain | Levant | Gulf | Nile | Maghreb | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JO | LB | PS | SY | SA | OM | YE | EG | SD | LY | MA | MR | TN | |
| Agriculture/Farming | 825 | 1,140 | 1,770 | 931 | 1,162 | 915 | 529 | 583 | 163 | 231 | 570 | 970 | 481 |
| Commerce/Transactions | 750 | 1,004 | 1,595 | 749 | 1,020 | 650 | 579 | 506 | 201 | 160 | 445 | 757 | 401 |
| Construction/Real Estate | 859 | 995 | 1,761 | 861 | 1,161 | 974 | 696 | 660 | 225 | 271 | 574 | 673 | 485 |
| Education/Academia | 816 | 1,191 | 1,513 | 831 | 1,017 | 1,079 | 563 | 549 | 170 | 220 | 601 | 863 | 551 |
| Energy/Resources | 786 | 1,048 | 1,715 | 928 | 1,177 | 937 | 587 | 625 | 189 | 243 | 447 | 719 | 470 |
| Everyday/Social | 967 | 1,215 | 1,697 | 787 | 1,020 | 888 | 642 | 604 | 175 | 210 | 595 | 824 | 550 |
| Healthcare/Medical | 727 | 1,240 | 1,728 | 781 | 1,043 | 895 | 548 | 487 | 164 | 253 | 556 | 948 | 522 |
| Legal/Financial | 693 | 1,006 | 1,566 | 757 | 857 | 753 | 496 | 539 | 177 | 174 | 481 | 642 | 412 |
| Logistics/Transport | 842 | 1,020 | 1,512 | 950 | 1,234 | 842 | 629 | 646 | 189 | 187 | 593 | 877 | 515 |
| Professional/Workplace | 845 | 1,220 | 1,810 | 959 | 1,112 | 866 | 549 | 645 | 178 | 253 | 480 | 709 | 526 |
| Tourism/Hospitality | 720 | 1,161 | 1,596 | 884 | 1,004 | 815 | 608 | 608 | 190 | 216 | 567 | 878 | 460 |
| Total | 8,830 | 12,240 | 18,263 | 9,418 | 11,807 | 9,614 | 6,426 | 6,452 | 2,021 | 2,418 | 5,909 | 8,860 | 5,373 |
Qualitative Examples
Resources
Read the full Alexandria research paper on ACL Anthology.
Open ACL AnthologyBrowse the Alexandria dataset release on Hugging Face, including splits and hosted dataset files.
Open Dataset on 🤗Access the Alexandria project repository on GitHub for evaluation code, updates, and related project materials.
Open GitHubAuthors
Citation
@inproceedings{el-mekki-etal-2026-alexandria,
title = "Alexandria: A Multi-Domain Dialectal {A}rabic Machine Translation Dataset for Culturally Inclusive and Linguistically Diverse {LLM}s",
author = "EL Mekki, Abdellah and
Magdy, Samar M. and
Atou, Houdaifa and
AbuHweidi, Ruwa and
Qawasmeh, Baraah and
Nacar, Omer and
Al-hibiri, Thikra and
Saadie, Razan and
Alsayadi, Hamzah A. and
Hammouda, Nadia Ghezaiel and
Alkhazimi, Alshima Mohammed and
Hamod, Aya and
Al-Ghafri, Al-Yas Yaqoob and
El-Sayed, Wesam and
al Sharji, Asila Ismail and
Ballout, Mohamad and
Belfathi, Anas and
Ghaddar, Karim and
Sibaee, Serry and
Aoun, Alaa and
Aseri, Aeej Mohammed and
Abureesh, Lina and
Bashiti, Ahlam and
Yousef, Majdal and
Hafiz, Abdulaziz and
Mohamed, Yehdih and
Hamedtou, Emira and
Emehah, Brakehe and
Alhamouri, Rahaf and
Nafea, Youssef and
El Aatar, Aya and
Al-Dhabyani, Walid and
Hamed, Emhemed S. and
Shatnawi, Sara and
Alwajih, Fakhraddin and
Elkhidir, Khalid and
Alasmari, Ashwag and
Gerrio, Abdurrahman and
Alshahri, Omar Said and
Elmadany, AbdelRahim A. and
Berrada, Ismail and
Al-kathiri, Amir Azad Adli and
Zaraket, Fadi and
Jarrar, Mustafa and
EL Hadj, Yahya Mohamed and
Alhuzali, Hassan and
Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1503/",
pages = "32567--32592",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6"
}