This repository contains the data and resources associated with Istidlal, the first Arabic benchmark for evaluating logical and sequential reasoning in Arabic Large Language Models (LLMs) within the economic and financial domain. The repository includes two main assets: 1. Arabic Economic and Financial News Corpus (AEFNC) A curated corpus of 5,450 Arabic news articles collected from four reputable financial sources: Al-Eqtisadiah, Asharq Business, CMA Financial News, and Alsayrfah. The corpus covers economic and financial topics including Islamic finance and Sharia-compliant governance, spanning the period 2010–2025. 2. Istidlal Benchmark A set of 1,000 validated reasoning scenarios derived from the AEFNC, provided under two complementary task setups: (i) MCQ (Multiple-Choice Questions): 500 items targeting recognition-based sequential reasoning, where the model selects the correct event ordering from four candidate options. (ii) OOQ (Open-Order Questions): 500 items targeting generative sequential reasoning, where the model constructs the correct event sequence from scratch.
The results are packaged in the Greenfield Startup Model (GSM), which explains the priority of startups to release the product as quickly as possible, and the need to shorten time-to-market, by speeding up the development through low-precision engineering activities.
Carmine Giardino, Nicolò Paternoster, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· IEEE Transactions on Softwar...· 178 citations· ⚡14
Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited timeframes and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models.
M. Unterkalmsteiner, P. Abrahamsson, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· e-Informatica Software Engin...· 157 citations· ⚡17
This study conducts a case survey study based on the secondary data of the major pivots happened in 49 software startups, and demonstrates that customer need pivot is the most common among all pivot types.
Sohaib Shahid Bajwa, Xiaofeng Wang, Anh Nguyen-Duc et al.· Empirical Software Engineeri...· 127 citations· ⚡15
The comparison of adopter and non-adopter sample reveals three potential adoption inhibitor, security, data privacy, and portability, which underlines the importance of the technical and security perspectives for research investigating the adoption of technology.
Nattakarn Phaphoom, Xiaofeng Wang, S. Samuel et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 111 citations· ⚡8
The ongoing work building a Raspberry Pi cluster consisting of 300 nodes is presented, with potential use cases being an inexpensive and green test bed for cloud computing research and a robust and mobile data center for operating in adverse environments.
P. Abrahamsson, S. Helmer, Nattakarn Phaphoom et al.· IEEE International Conferenc...· 110 citations· ⚡7
The results indicate that software developers are a slightly happy population, but the need for limiting the unhappiness of developers remains, and 219 factors representing causes of unhappiness while developing software are identified.
D. Graziotin, Fabian Fagerholm, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· International Conference on...· 84 citations· ⚡6
Related blog posts
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduOct 8, 2026
