Sara Chrouf / Journal

Zuihitsu, the Journal

Essays that follow the brush, written from inside the building of Kuwain, Sadeed, Mutarjim, and Baseer: each starts at a technical detail and ends at an institutional question. No schedule; published when ready.

May 2026

From Oil to Weights

Compute is drills, not crude. The real refinery: data, evaluation, deployment, people, an own-rent-ally sort, and a ledger of questions for ministries.

Published9 minInstitutions
Apr 2026

A Benchmark Translated Is Not a Benchmark Inherited

A translated exam is a transformed exam: imported assumptions, translator artifacts, blind spots. Why we built Tarjama-25 and SadeedDiac-25, plus a four-question inheritance test.

Published8 minEvaluation
Mar 2026

Diacritics Are Signal, Not Noise

What curating Sadeed’s data taught us: the marks are compressed meaning, stripping them is the real clutter, and why the benchmarks lied until we built SadeedDiac-25.

Published8 minArabic NLP
Feb 2026

The Tokenizer Is a Border

Subword vocabularies are trade agreements written in English. What an Arabic user pays at the crossing. From inside the Kuwain experience.

Published9 minArabic NLP
Research note

The Venture House as a Research Instrument

Misraj from the inside: what a researcher learns when the lab is a market.

Research noteInstitutions
Research note

Inference Is a Real Estate Problem

What a token costs in Dammam versus Virginia, and why some things get built and some get rented.

Research noteInstitutions
Research note

Ma (間): Negative Space as a Research Method

What the benchmark does not say, what the session does not answer, and why I design for the gaps on purpose.

Research noteMarginalia

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