---
configs:
- config_name: yor
  data_files: 
  - split: train
    path:  yor_train.csv
  # - split: test
  #   path: yor_test.csv
  - split: dev
    path: yor_dev.csv
# - config_name: ara
#   data_files: 
#   - split: test
#     path: ara_test.csv
---


<center> <h2> Are LLMs Good Text Diacritizers? An Arabic and Yorùbá Case Study </h2> </center>


<center> <b> Hawau Olamide Toyin, Samar Magdy, Hanan Aldarmaki </b> </center> 

 We investigate the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) for text diacritization  in two typologically distinct languages: Arabic and Yoruba. To enable a rigorous evaluation, we introduce a novel multilingual dataset <strong>MultiDiac</strong>
 , with diverse samples that capture a range of diacritic ambiguities. We evaluate 14 LLMs varying in size, accessibility, and language coverage, and benchmarked them against 6 specialized diacritization models. Additionally, we fine-tune four small open-source models using LoRA for Yoruba. Our results show that many off-the-shelf LLMs outperform specialized diacritiztion models for both Arabic and Yoruba, but smaller models suffer from hallucinations. Fine-tuning on a small dataset can help improve diacritization performance and reduce hallucination rates.


 #### Cite this work:
 ```
 @misc{toyin2025llmsgoodtextdiacritizers,
      title={Are LLMs Good Text Diacritizers? An Arabic and Yor\`ub\'a Case Study}, 
      author={Hawau Olamide Toyin and Samar M. Magdy and Hanan Aldarmaki},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2506.11602},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11602}, 
}
```