mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

SAHM: A Benchmark for Arabic Financial and Shari'ah-Compliant Reasoning

arXiv 2604.19098 ↗First posted 21 Apr 2026cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 2

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning for agents, planning and code

Abstract (arXiv)

English financial NLP has advanced rapidly through benchmarks targeting earnings analysis, market sentiment, tabular reasoning, and financial question answering, yet Arabic financial NLP remains virtually nonexistent, despite 422 million speakers, 4.9 trillion in Gulf sovereign wealth, and a 4-5 trillion Islamic finance industry requiring specialized Shari'ah compliance over instruments like sukuk, murabaha, and takaful. We introduce Sahm, the first Arabic financial benchmark spanning seven tasks: AAOIFI standards QA, fatwa-based QA/MCQ, accounting and business exams, financial sentiment analysis, extractive summarization, and event-cause reasoning, comprising 14,380 expert-verified instances from authentic regulatory, juristic, and corporate sources. Evaluating 20 LLMs, we find Arabic fluency does not imply financial reasoning: models achieving 91% on recognition tasks drop sharply on generation, and event-cause reasoning exposes the widest performance gap (1.89-9.84/10). We release the benchmark and dataset to support trustworthy Arabic financial assistants.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 14 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2026.

Builds on

14 of 41 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025FinChain: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Chain-of-Thought Financial Reasoning3 Jun

Other references · 13

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  5. 2025Gemma 3 Technical Reportcited by 1,824
  6. 2024Mixtral of Expertscited by 1,823
  7. 2019FinBERT: Financial Sentiment Analysis with Pre-trained Language Modelscited by 385
  8. 2023Jais and Jais-chat: Arabic-Centric Foundation and Instruction-Tuned Open Generative Large Language Modelscited by 69
  9. 2025Fanar: An Arabic-Centric Multimodal Generative AI Platformcited by 67
  10. 2024ALLaM: Large Language Models for Arabic and Englishcited by 55
  11. 2025Plutus: Benchmarking Large Language Models in Low-Resource Greek Financecited by 18
  12. 2025MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Applicationcited by 14
1 more
  1. 2025AIN: The Arabic INclusive Large Multimodal Modelcited by 8

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

  1. 2026Overview of FinMMEval 2026 Task 1: Multilingual Financial Multiple-Choice Question Answeringcited by 0
  2. 2026Overview of FinMMEval 2026 Task 2: Multilingual Financial Short-Answer Question Answeringcited by 0

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