Cross-Dialectal Transfer Learning for Offensive Language Detection in Arabic

Automated offensive language detection (OLD) is essential for online safety, yet remains particularly challenging for under-resourced languages and their dialectal variations. This paper addresses these challenges by evaluating OLD across three low-resource Arabic dialects: Egyptian, Libyan, and Levantine, using newly collected dialect-specific datasets and a novel parallel corpus for controlled cross-dialect analysis.We benchmark a wide range of models, including encoder-only, encoder–decoder,