Falcon-Emirati: When an LLM Learns the Dialect, the Culture, and the Nuance

Falcon-Emirati-7B is a large language model specialized to understand and generate the Emirati dialect of Arabic, capturing its unique vocabulary and cultural context. Built upon the more general Falcon-H1-Arabic model, it aims to close the gap between Modern Standard Arabic and the nuances of everyday spoken language. The development process addresses challenges like the scarcity of written dialectal data and the importance of non-literal, cultural meanings. The team's approach involved using a mix of authentic web data, cultural information, and synthetically generated data to train the model.