Daily Papers

Arabic document OCR remains a challenging task due to the language's cursive script, diverse fonts, diacritics, and right-to-left orientation. While modern Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced document understanding for high-resource languages, their performance on Arabic remains limited. In this work, we introduce Baseer, a vision-language model fine- tuned specifically for Arabic document OCR. Leveraging a large-scale dataset combining synthetic and real-world documents, Baseer is trained using a decoder-only fine-tuning strategy to adapt a pre-trained MLLM while preserving general visual features. We also present Misraj-DocOCR, a high-quality, expert-verified benchmark designed for rigorous evaluation of Arabic OCR systems. Our experiments show that Baseer significantly outperforms existing open-source and commercial solutions, achieving a WER of 0.25 and establishing a new state-of-the-art in the domain of Arabic document OCR. Our results highlight the benefits of domain-specific adaptation of general-purpose MLLMs and establish a strong baseline for high-accuracy OCR on morphologically rich languages like Arabic.

We present AraLingBench: a fully human annotated benchmark for evaluating the Arabic linguistic competence of large language models (LLMs). The benchmark spans five core categories: grammar, morphology, spelling, reading comprehension, and syntax, through 150 expert-designed multiple choice questions that directly assess structural language understanding. Evaluating 35 Arabic and bilingual LLMs reveals that current models demonstrate strong surface level proficiency but struggle with deeper grammatical and syntactic reasoning. AraLingBench highlights a persistent gap between high scores on knowledge-based benchmarks and true linguistic mastery, showing that many models succeed through memorization or pattern recognition rather than authentic comprehension. By isolating and measuring fundamental linguistic skills, AraLingBench provides a diagnostic framework for developing Arabic LLMs. The full evaluation code is publicly available on GitHub.

Arabic text diacritization remains a persistent challenge in natural language processing due to the language's morphological richness. In this paper, we introduce Sadeed, a novel approach based on a fine-tuned decoder-only language model adapted from Kuwain 1.5B Hennara et al. [2025], a compact model originally trained on diverse Arabic corpora. Sadeed is fine-tuned on carefully curated, high-quality diacritized datasets, constructed through a rigorous data-cleaning and normalization pipeline. Despite utilizing modest computational resources, Sadeed achieves competitive results compared to proprietary large language models and outperforms traditional models trained on similar domains. Additionally, we highlight key limitations in current benchmarking practices for Arabic diacritization. To address these issues, we introduce SadeedDiac-25, a new benchmark designed to enable fairer and more comprehensive evaluation across diverse text genres and complexity levels. Together, Sadeed and SadeedDiac-25 provide a robust foundation for advancing Arabic NLP applications, including machine translation, text-to-speech, and language learning tools.

Arabic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwriting Recognition (HWR) pose unique challenges due to the cursive and context-sensitive nature of the Arabic script. This study introduces Qalam, a novel foundation model designed for Arabic OCR and HWR, built on a SwinV2 encoder and RoBERTa decoder architecture. Our model significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving a Word Error Rate (WER) of just 0.80% in HWR tasks and 1.18% in OCR tasks. We train Qalam on a diverse dataset, including over 4.5 million images from Arabic manuscripts and a synthetic dataset comprising 60k image-text pairs. Notably, Qalam demonstrates exceptional handling of Arabic diacritics, a critical feature in Arabic scripts. Furthermore, it shows a remarkable ability to process high-resolution inputs, addressing a common limitation in current OCR systems. These advancements underscore Qalam's potential as a leading solution for Arabic script recognition, offering a significant leap in accuracy and efficiency.

Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, yet efforts to develop and evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for Arabic remain relatively limited. Most existing Arabic benchmarks focus on linguistic, cultural, or religious content, leaving a significant gap in domains like STEM and code which are increasingly relevant for real-world LLM applications. To help bridge this gap, we present 3LM, a suite of three benchmarks designed specifically for Arabic. The first is a set of STEM-related question-answer pairs, naturally sourced from Arabic textbooks and educational worksheets. The second consists of synthetically generated STEM questions, created using the same sources. The third benchmark focuses on code generation, built through a careful translation of two widely used code benchmarks, incorporating a human-in-the-loop process with several rounds of review to ensure high-quality and faithful translations. We release all three benchmarks publicly to support the growth of Arabic LLM research in these essential but underrepresented areas.

We present Arabic-Nougat, a suite of OCR models for converting Arabic book pages into structured Markdown text. Based on Meta's Nougat architecture, Arabic-Nougat includes three specialized models: arabic-small-nougat, arabic-base-nougat, and arabic-large-nougat. These models are fine-tuned on a synthetic dataset, arabic-img2md, comprising 13.7k pairs of Arabic book pages and their Markdown representations. Key contributions include the Aranizer-PBE-86k tokenizer, designed for efficient tokenization, and the use of torch.bfloat16 precision with Flash Attention 2 for optimized training and inference. Our models achieve state-of-the-art performance, with arabic-large-nougat delivering the highest Markdown Structure Accuracy and the lowest Character Error Rate. Additionally, we release a large-scale dataset containing 1.1 billion Arabic tokens extracted from over 8,500 books using our best-performing model, providing a valuable resource for Arabic OCR research. All models, datasets, and code are open-sourced and available at https://github.com/MohamedAliRashad/arabic-nougat.

The predominance of English and Latin-based large language models (LLMs) has led to a notable deficit in native Arabic LLMs. This discrepancy is accentuated by the prevalent inclusion of English tokens in existing Arabic models, detracting from their efficacy in processing native Arabic's intricate morphology and syntax. Consequently, there is a theoretical and practical imperative for developing LLMs predominantly focused on Arabic linguistic elements. To address this gap, this paper proposes ArabianGPT, a series of transformer-based models within the ArabianLLM suite designed explicitly for Arabic. These models, including ArabianGPT-0.1B and ArabianGPT-0.3B, vary in size and complexity, aligning with the nuanced linguistic characteristics of Arabic. The AraNizer tokenizer, integral to these models, addresses the unique morphological aspects of Arabic script, ensuring more accurate text processing. Empirical results from fine-tuning the models on tasks like sentiment analysis and summarization demonstrate significant improvements. For sentiment analysis, the fine-tuned ArabianGPT-0.1B model achieved a remarkable accuracy of 95%, a substantial increase from the base model's 56%. Similarly, in summarization tasks, fine-tuned models showed enhanced F1 scores, indicating improved precision and recall in generating concise summaries. Comparative analysis of fine-tuned ArabianGPT models against their base versions across various benchmarks reveals nuanced differences in performance, with fine-tuning positively impacting specific tasks like question answering and summarization. These findings underscore the efficacy of fine-tuning in aligning ArabianGPT models more closely with specific NLP tasks, highlighting the potential of tailored transformer architectures in advancing Arabic NLP.

Text classification systems have been proven vulnerable to adversarial text examples, modified versions of the original text examples that are often unnoticed by human eyes, yet can force text classification models to alter their classification. Often, research works quantifying the impact of adversarial text attacks have been applied only to models trained in English. In this paper, we introduce the first word-level study of adversarial attacks in Arabic. Specifically, we use a synonym (word-level) attack using a Masked Language Modeling (MLM) task with a BERT model in a black-box setting to assess the robustness of the state-of-the-art text classification models to adversarial attacks in Arabic. To evaluate the grammatical and semantic similarities of the newly produced adversarial examples using our synonym BERT-based attack, we invite four human evaluators to assess and compare the produced adversarial examples with their original examples. We also study the transferability of these newly produced Arabic adversarial examples to various models and investigate the effectiveness of defense mechanisms against these adversarial examples on the BERT models. We find that fine-tuned BERT models were more susceptible to our synonym attacks than the other Deep Neural Networks (DNN) models like WordCNN and WordLSTM we trained. We also find that fine-tuned BERT models were more susceptible to transferred attacks. We, lastly, find that fine-tuned BERT models successfully regain at least 2% in accuracy after applying adversarial training as an initial defense mechanism.

Advances in English language representation enabled a more sample-efficient pre-training task by Efficiently Learning an Encoder that Classifies Token Replacements Accurately (ELECTRA). Which, instead of training a model to recover masked tokens, it trains a discriminator model to distinguish true input tokens from corrupted tokens that were replaced by a generator network. On the other hand, current Arabic language representation approaches rely only on pretraining via masked language modeling. In this paper, we develop an Arabic language representation model, which we name AraELECTRA. Our model is pretrained using the replaced token detection objective on large Arabic text corpora. We evaluate our model on multiple Arabic NLP tasks, including reading comprehension, sentiment analysis, and named-entity recognition and we show that AraELECTRA outperforms current state-of-the-art Arabic language representation models, given the same pretraining data and with even a smaller model size.

The Arabic language is a morphologically rich language with relatively few resources and a less explored syntax compared to English. Given these limitations, Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks like Sentiment Analysis (SA), Named Entity Recognition (NER), and Question Answering (QA), have proven to be very challenging to tackle. Recently, with the surge of transformers based models, language-specific BERT based models have proven to be very efficient at language understanding, provided they are pre-trained on a very large corpus. Such models were able to set new standards and achieve state-of-the-art results for most NLP tasks. In this paper, we pre-trained BERT specifically for the Arabic language in the pursuit of achieving the same success that BERT did for the English language. The performance of AraBERT is compared to multilingual BERT from Google and other state-of-the-art approaches. The results showed that the newly developed AraBERT achieved state-of-the-art performance on most tested Arabic NLP tasks. The pretrained araBERT models are publicly available on https://github.com/aub-mind/arabert hoping to encourage research and applications for Arabic NLP.

Arabic poses a particular challenge for natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) due to its complex morphology, optional diacritics and the coexistence of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and various dialects. Despite the growing global significance of Arabic, it is still underrepresented in NLP research and benchmark resources. In this paper, we present an enhanced Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) framework developed specifically for Arabic. At the core of our approach is a novel Attentive Relevance Scoring (ARS) that replaces standard interaction mechanisms with an adaptive scoring function that more effectively models the semantic relevance between questions and passages. Our method integrates pre-trained Arabic language models and architectural refinements to improve retrieval performance and significantly increase ranking accuracy when answering Arabic questions. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Bekhouche/APR{GitHub}.

This paper examines how domain specificity affects abstractive summarisation of Arabic financial texts using large language models (LLMs). We present AraFinNews, the largest publicly available Arabic financial news dataset to date, comprising 212,500 article-headline pairs spanning almost a decade of reporting from October 2015 to July 2025. Developed as an Arabic counterpart to major English summarisation corpora such as CNN/DailyMail, AraFinNews offers a strong benchmark for assessing domain-focused language understanding and generation in financial contexts. Using this resource, we evaluate transformer-based models, including mT5, AraT5 and the domain-adapted FinAraT5, to investigate how financial-domain pretraining influences accuracy, numerical reliability and stylistic alignment with professional reporting. The results show that domain-adapted models produce more coherent summaries, particularly when handling quantitative and entity-centred information. These findings underscore the value of domain-specific adaptation for improving narrative fluency in Arabic financial summarisation. The dataset is freely available for non-commercial research at https://github.com/ArabicNLP-UK/AraFinNews.

ArabJobs is a publicly available corpus of Arabic job advertisements collected from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Comprising over 8,500 postings and more than 550,000 words, the dataset captures linguistic, regional, and socio-economic variation in the Arab labour market. We present analyses of gender representation and occupational structure, and highlight dialectal variation across ads, which offers opportunities for future research. We also demonstrate applications such as salary estimation and job category normalisation using large language models, alongside benchmark tasks for gender bias detection and profession classification. The findings show the utility of ArabJobs for fairness-aware Arabic NLP and labour market research. The dataset is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/drelhaj/ArabJobs.

Arabic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is essential for converting vast amounts of Arabic print media into digital formats. However, training modern OCR models, especially powerful vision-language models, is hampered by the lack of large, diverse, and well-structured datasets that mimic real-world book layouts. Existing Arabic OCR datasets often focus on isolated words or lines or are limited in scale, typographic variety, or structural complexity found in books. To address this significant gap, we introduce SARD (Large-Scale Synthetic Arabic OCR Dataset). SARD is a massive, synthetically generated dataset specifically designed to simulate book-style documents. It comprises 843,622 document images containing 690 million words, rendered across ten distinct Arabic fonts to ensure broad typographic coverage. Unlike datasets derived from scanned documents, SARD is free from real-world noise and distortions, offering a clean and controlled environment for model training. Its synthetic nature provides unparalleled scalability and allows for precise control over layout and content variation. We detail the dataset's composition and generation process and provide benchmark results for several OCR models, including traditional and deep learning approaches, highlighting the challenges and opportunities presented by this dataset. SARD serves as a valuable resource for developing and evaluating robust OCR and vision-language models capable of processing diverse Arabic book-style texts.

Arabic poetry is one of the richest and most culturally rooted forms of expression in the Arabic language, known for its layered meanings, stylistic diversity, and deep historical continuity. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across languages and tasks, their ability to understand Arabic poetry remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce Fann or Flop, the first benchmark designed to assess the comprehension of Arabic poetry by LLMs in 12 historical eras, covering 14 core poetic genres and a variety of metrical forms, from classical structures to contemporary free verse. The benchmark comprises a curated corpus of poems with explanations that assess semantic understanding, metaphor interpretation, prosodic awareness, and cultural context. We argue that poetic comprehension offers a strong indicator for testing how good the LLM understands classical Arabic through Arabic poetry. Unlike surface-level tasks, this domain demands deeper interpretive reasoning and cultural sensitivity. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs shows that most models struggle with poetic understanding despite strong results on standard Arabic benchmarks. We release "Fann or Flop" along with the evaluation suite as an open-source resource to enable rigorous evaluation and advancement for Arabic language models. Code is available at: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/FannOrFlop.

We introduce ARACNE, a fully autonomous LLM-based pentesting agent tailored for SSH services that can execute commands on real Linux shell systems. Introduces a new agent architecture with multi-LLM model support. Experiments show that ARACNE can reach a 60\% success rate against the autonomous defender ShelLM and a 57.58\% success rate against the Over The Wire Bandit CTF challenges, improving over the state-of-the-art. When winning, the average number of actions taken by the agent to accomplish the goals was less than 5. The results show that the use of multi-LLM is a promising approach to increase accuracy in the actions.

Arabic handwritten text recognition (HTR) is challenging, especially for historical texts, due to diverse writing styles and the intrinsic features of Arabic script. Additionally, Arabic handwriting datasets are smaller compared to English ones, making it difficult to train generalizable Arabic HTR models. To address these challenges, we propose HATFormer, a transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture that builds on a state-of-the-art English HTR model. By leveraging the transformer's attention mechanism, HATFormer captures spatial contextual information to address the intrinsic challenges of Arabic script through differentiating cursive characters, decomposing visual representations, and identifying diacritics. Our customization to historical handwritten Arabic includes an image processor for effective ViT information preprocessing, a text tokenizer for compact Arabic text representation, and a training pipeline that accounts for a limited amount of historic Arabic handwriting data. HATFormer achieves a character error rate (CER) of 8.6% on the largest public historical handwritten Arabic dataset, with a 51% improvement over the best baseline in the literature. HATFormer also attains a comparable CER of 4.2% on the largest private non-historical dataset. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of adapting an English HTR method to a low-resource language with complex, language-specific challenges, contributing to advancements in document digitization, information retrieval, and cultural preservation.

This study thoroughly investigates how well deep learning models can recognize Arabic handwritten text for person biometric identification. It compares three advanced architectures -- ResNet50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB7 -- using three widely recognized datasets: AHAWP, Khatt, and LAMIS-MSHD. Results show that EfficientNetB7 outperforms the others, achieving test accuracies of 98.57\%, 99.15\%, and 99.79\% on AHAWP, Khatt, and LAMIS-MSHD datasets, respectively. EfficientNetB7's exceptional performance is credited to its innovative techniques, including compound scaling, depth-wise separable convolutions, and squeeze-and-excitation blocks. These features allow the model to extract more abstract and distinctive features from handwritten text images. The study's findings hold significant implications for enhancing identity verification and authentication systems, highlighting the potential of deep learning in Arabic handwritten text recognition for person biometric identification.

The focus of language model evaluation has transitioned towards reasoning and knowledge-intensive tasks, driven by advancements in pretraining large models. While state-of-the-art models are partially trained on large Arabic texts, evaluating their performance in Arabic remains challenging due to the limited availability of relevant datasets. To bridge this gap, we present ArabicMMLU, the first multi-task language understanding benchmark for Arabic language, sourced from school exams across diverse educational levels in different countries spanning North Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf regions. Our data comprises 40 tasks and 14,575 multiple-choice questions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and is carefully constructed by collaborating with native speakers in the region. Our comprehensive evaluations of 35 models reveal substantial room for improvement, particularly among the best open-source models. Notably, BLOOMZ, mT0, LLama2, and Falcon struggle to achieve a score of 50%, while even the top-performing Arabic-centric model only achieves a score of 62.3%.

We present AraMix, a deduplicated Arabic pretraining corpus containing approximately 178 billion tokens across 179 million documents. Rather than scraping the web again, AraMix demonstrates that substantial value lies in systematically reusing and curating existing pretraining datasets: we combine seven publicly available Arabic web datasets, apply quality filtering designed specifically for Arabic text to re-filter some datasets, and perform cross-dataset deduplication, both MinHash and sentence-level. This approach reveals that nearly 60% of tokens across these independently collected corpora are duplicates, redundancy that any new scraping efforts will reproduce. Our work suggests that for lower resource languages, investment in curation pipelines for existing data yields greater returns than additional web crawls, an approach that allowed us to curate the largest heavily filtered publicly available Arabic pretraining corpus.

Arabic text-to-speech (TTS) remains challenging due to limited resources and complex phonological patterns. We present reproducible baselines for Arabic TTS built on the FastPitch architecture and introduce cepstral-domain metrics for analyzing oversmoothing in mel-spectrogram prediction. While traditional Lp reconstruction losses yield smooth but over-averaged outputs, the proposed metrics reveal their temporal and spectral effects throughout training. To address this, we incorporate a lightweight adversarial spectrogram loss, which trains stably and substantially reduces oversmoothing. We further explore multi-speaker Arabic TTS by augmenting FastPitch with synthetic voices generated using XTTSv2, resulting in improved prosodic diversity without loss of stability. The code, pretrained models, and training recipes are publicly available at: https://github.com/nipponjo/tts-arabic-pytorch.

The performance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems fundamentally depends on high-quality training data. However, low-resource languages like Arabic suffer from severe data scarcity. Moreover, the absence of child-specific speech corpora is an essential gap that poses significant challenges. To address this gap, we present our created dataset, Arabic Little STT, a dataset of Levantine Arabic child speech recorded in classrooms, containing 355 utterances from 288 children (ages 6 - 13). We further conduct a systematic assessment of Whisper, a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) model, on this dataset and compare its performance with adult Arabic benchmarks. Our evaluation across eight Whisper variants reveals that even the best-performing model (Large_v3) struggles significantly, achieving a 0.66 word error rate (WER) on child speech, starkly contrasting with its sub 0.20 WER on adult datasets. These results align with other research on English speech. Results highlight the critical need for dedicated child speech benchmarks and inclusive training data in ASR development. Emphasizing that such data must be governed by strict ethical and privacy frameworks to protect sensitive child information. We hope that this study provides an initial step for future work on equitable speech technologies for Arabic-speaking children. We hope that our publicly available dataset enrich the children's demographic representation in ASR datasets.

Recently, extensive research on the hallucination of the large language models (LLMs) has mainly focused on the English language. Despite the growing number of multilingual and Arabic-specific LLMs, evaluating LLMs' hallucination in the Arabic context remains relatively underexplored. The knowledge gap is particularly pressing given Arabic's widespread use across many regions and its importance in global communication and media. This paper presents the first comprehensive hallucination evaluation of Arabic and multilingual LLMs on two critical Arabic natural language generation tasks: generative question answering (GQA) and summarization. This study evaluates a total of 12 LLMs, including 4 Arabic pre-trained models, 4 multilingual models, and 4 reasoning-based models. To assess the factual consistency and faithfulness of LLMs' outputs, we developed a fine-grained hallucination evaluation framework consisting of 12 fine-grained hallucination indicators that represent the varying characteristics of each task. The results reveal that factual hallucinations are more prevalent than faithfulness errors across all models and tasks. Notably, the Arabic pre-trained model Allam consistently demonstrates lower hallucination rates than multilingual models and a comparative performance with reasoning-based models. The code is available at: https://github.com/aishaalansari57/AraHalluEval

Arabic dialects form a diverse continuum, yet NLP models often treat them as discrete categories. Recent work addresses this issue by modeling dialectness as a continuous variable, notably through the Arabic Level of Dialectness (ALDi). However, ALDi reduces complex variation to a single dimension. We propose a complementary measure: the Arabic Generality Score (AGS), which quantifies how widely a word is used across dialects. We introduce a pipeline that combines word alignment, etymology-aware edit distance, and smoothing to annotate a parallel corpus with word-level AGS. A regression model is then trained to predict AGS in context. Our approach outperforms strong baselines, including state-of-the-art dialect ID systems, on a multi-dialect benchmark. AGS offers a scalable, linguistically grounded way to model lexical generality, enriching representations of Arabic dialectness.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown promise in enhancing recommendation systems by incorporating external context into large language model prompts. However, existing RAG-based approaches often rely on static retrieval heuristics and fail to capture nuanced user preferences in dynamic recommendation scenarios. In this work, we introduce ARAG, an Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework for Personalized Recommendation, which integrates a multi-agent collaboration mechanism into the RAG pipeline. To better understand the long-term and session behavior of the user, ARAG leverages four specialized LLM-based agents: a User Understanding Agent that summarizes user preferences from long-term and session contexts, a Natural Language Inference (NLI) Agent that evaluates semantic alignment between candidate items retrieved by RAG and inferred intent, a context summary agent that summarizes the findings of NLI agent, and an Item Ranker Agent that generates a ranked list of recommendations based on contextual fit. We evaluate ARAG accross three datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that ARAG significantly outperforms standard RAG and recency-based baselines, achieving up to 42.1% improvement in NDCG@5 and 35.5% in Hit@5. We also, conduct an ablation study to analyse the effect by different components of ARAG. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of integrating agentic reasoning into retrieval-augmented recommendation and provide new directions for LLM-based personalization.

The Arabic language is among the most popular languages in the world with a huge variety of dialects spoken in 22 countries. In this study, we address the problem of classifying 18 Arabic dialects of the QADI dataset of Arabic tweets. RNN models, Transformer models, and large language models (LLMs) via prompt engineering are created and tested. Among these, MARBERTv2 performed best with 65% accuracy and 64% F1-score. Through the use of state-of-the-art preprocessing techniques and the latest NLP models, this paper identifies the most significant linguistic issues in Arabic dialect identification. The results corroborate applications like personalized chatbots that respond in users' dialects, social media monitoring, and greater accessibility for Arabic communities.

Arabic dialect identification (ADI) systems are essential for large-scale data collection pipelines that enable the development of inclusive speech technologies for Arabic language varieties. However, the reliability of current ADI systems is limited by poor generalization to out-of-domain speech. In this paper, we present an effective approach based on voice conversion for training ADI models that achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly improves robustness in cross-domain scenarios. Evaluated on a newly collected real-world test set spanning four different domains, our approach yields consistent improvements of up to +34.1% in accuracy across domains. Furthermore, we present an analysis of our approach and demonstrate that voice conversion helps mitigate the speaker bias in the ADI dataset. We release our robust ADI model and cross-domain evaluation dataset to support the development of inclusive speech technologies for Arabic.

Arabic has diverse dialects, where one dialect can be substantially different from the others. In the NLP literature, some assumptions about these dialects are widely adopted (e.g., ``Arabic dialects can be grouped into distinguishable regional dialects") and are manifested in different computational tasks such as Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI). However, these assumptions are not quantitatively verified. We identify four of these assumptions and examine them by extending and analyzing a multi-label dataset, where the validity of each sentence in 11 different country-level dialects is manually assessed by speakers of these dialects. Our analysis indicates that the four assumptions oversimplify reality, and some of them are not always accurate. This in turn might be hindering further progress in different Arabic NLP tasks.

Arabic poetry is an essential and integral part of Arabic language and culture. It has been used by the Arabs to spot lights on their major events such as depicting brutal battles and conflicts. They also used it, as in many other languages, for various purposes such as romance, pride, lamentation, etc. Arabic poetry has received major attention from linguistics over the decades. One of the main characteristics of Arabic poetry is its special rhythmic structure as opposed to prose. This structure is referred to as a meter. Meters, along with other poetic characteristics, are intensively studied in an Arabic linguistic field called "Aroud". Identifying these meters for a verse is a lengthy and complicated process. It also requires technical knowledge in Aruod. For recited poetry, it adds an extra layer of processing. Developing systems for automatic identification of poem meters for recited poems need large amounts of labelled data. In this study, we propose a state-of-the-art framework to identify the poem meters of recited Arabic poetry, where we integrate two separate high-resource systems to perform the low-resource task. To ensure generalization of our proposed architecture, we publish a benchmark for this task for future research.

In this era of rapid technological advancements, communication continues to evolve as new linguistic phenomena emerge. Among these is Arabizi, a hybrid form of Arabic that incorporates Latin characters and numbers to represent the spoken dialects of Arab communities. Arabizi is widely used on social media and allows people to communicate in an informal and dynamic way, but it poses significant challenges for machine translation due to its lack of formal structure and deeply embedded cultural nuances. This case study arises from a growing need to translate Arabizi for gisting purposes. It evaluates the capacity of different LLMs to decode and translate Arabizi, focusing on multiple Arabic dialects that have rarely been studied up until now. Using a combination of human evaluators and automatic metrics, this research project investigates the model's performance in translating Arabizi into both Modern Standard Arabic and English. Key questions explored include which dialects are translated most effectively and whether translations into English surpass those into Arabic.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities, not only in generating human-like text, but also in acquiring knowledge. This highlights the need to go beyond the typical Natural Language Processing downstream benchmarks and asses the various aspects of LLMs including knowledge and reasoning. Numerous benchmarks have been developed to evaluate LLMs knowledge, but they predominantly focus on the English language. Given that many LLMs are multilingual, relying solely on benchmarking English knowledge is insufficient. To address this issue, we introduce AraSTEM, a new Arabic multiple-choice question dataset aimed at evaluating LLMs knowledge in STEM subjects. The dataset spans a range of topics at different levels which requires models to demonstrate a deep understanding of scientific Arabic in order to achieve high accuracy. Our findings show that publicly available models of varying sizes struggle with this dataset, and underscores the need for more localized language models. The dataset is freely accessible on Hugging Face.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive results in multiple domains of natural language processing (NLP) but are mainly focused on the English language. Recently, more LLMs have incorporated a larger proportion of multilingual text to represent low-resource languages. In Arabic NLP, several Arabic-centric LLMs have shown remarkable results on multiple benchmarks in the past two years. However, most Arabic LLMs have more than 7 billion parameters, which increases their hardware requirements and inference latency, when compared to smaller LLMs. This paper introduces Arabic Stable LM 1.6B in a base and chat version as a small but powerful Arabic-centric LLM. Our Arabic Stable LM 1.6B chat model achieves impressive results on several benchmarks beating multiple models with up to 8x the parameters. In addition, we show the benefit of mixing in synthetic instruction tuning data by augmenting our fine-tuning data with a large synthetic dialogue dataset.

Natural language processing (NLP) utilizes text data augmentation to overcome sample size constraints. Increasing the sample size is a natural and widely used strategy for alleviating these challenges. In this study, we chose Arabic to increase the sample size and correct grammatical errors. Arabic is considered one of the languages with limited resources for grammatical error correction (GEC). Furthermore, QALB-14 and QALB-15 are the only datasets used in most Arabic grammatical error correction research, with approximately 20,500 parallel examples, which is considered low compared with other languages. Therefore, this study aims to develop an Arabic corpus called "Tibyan" for grammatical error correction using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is used as a data augmenter tool based on a pair of Arabic sentences containing grammatical errors matched with a sentence free of errors extracted from Arabic books, called guide sentences. Multiple steps were involved in establishing our corpus, including the collection and pre-processing of a pair of Arabic texts from various sources, such as books and open-access corpora. We then used ChatGPT to generate a parallel corpus based on the text collected previously, as a guide for generating sentences with multiple types of errors. By engaging linguistic experts to review and validate the automatically generated sentences, we ensured that they were correct and error-free. The corpus was validated and refined iteratively based on feedback provided by linguistic experts to improve its accuracy. Finally, we used the Arabic Error Type Annotation tool (ARETA) to analyze the types of errors in the Tibyan corpus. Our corpus contained 49 of errors, including seven types: orthography, morphology, syntax, semantics, punctuation, merge, and split. The Tibyan corpus contains approximately 600 K tokens.

Arabic, with its rich diversity of dialects, remains significantly underrepresented in Large Language Models, particularly in dialectal variations. We address this gap by introducing seven synthetic datasets in dialects alongside Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), created using Machine Translation (MT) combined with human post-editing. We present AraDiCE, a benchmark for Arabic Dialect and Cultural Evaluation. We evaluate LLMs on dialect comprehension and generation, focusing specifically on low-resource Arabic dialects. Additionally, we introduce the first-ever fine-grained benchmark designed to evaluate cultural awareness across the Gulf, Egypt, and Levant regions, providing a novel dimension to LLM evaluation. Our findings demonstrate that while Arabic-specific models like Jais and AceGPT outperform multilingual models on dialectal tasks, significant challenges persist in dialect identification, generation, and translation. This work contributes ~45K post-edited samples, a cultural benchmark, and highlights the importance of tailored training to improve LLM performance in capturing the nuances of diverse Arabic dialects and cultural contexts. We will release the dialectal translation models and benchmarks curated in this study.

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to significant improvements in various natural language processing tasks. However, the evaluation of LLMs' legal knowledge, particularly in non-English languages such as Arabic, remains under-explored. To address this gap, we introduce ArabLegalEval, a multitask benchmark dataset for assessing the Arabic legal knowledge of LLMs. Inspired by the MMLU and LegalBench datasets, ArabLegalEval consists of multiple tasks sourced from Saudi legal documents and synthesized questions. In this work, we aim to analyze the capabilities required to solve legal problems in Arabic and benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs. We explore the impact of in-context learning and investigate various evaluation methods. Additionally, we explore workflows for generating questions with automatic validation to enhance the dataset's quality. We benchmark multilingual and Arabic-centric LLMs, such as GPT-4 and Jais, respectively. We also share our methodology for creating the dataset and validation, which can be generalized to other domains. We hope to accelerate AI research in the Arabic Legal domain by releasing the ArabLegalEval dataset and code: https://github.com/Thiqah/ArabLegalEval

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are integral to many modern natural language processing (NLP) systems. Although multilingual models cover a wide range of languages, they often grapple with challenges like high inference costs and a lack of diverse non-English training data. Arabic-specific PLMs are trained predominantly on modern standard Arabic, which compromises their performance on regional dialects. To tackle this, we construct an Arabic dialectal corpus comprising 3.4M sentences gathered from social media platforms. We utilize this corpus to expand the vocabulary and retrain a BERT-based model from scratch. Named AlcLaM, our model was trained using only 13 GB of text, which represents a fraction of the data used by existing models such as CAMeL, MARBERT, and ArBERT, compared to 7.8%, 10.2%, and 21.3%, respectively. Remarkably, AlcLaM demonstrates superior performance on a variety of Arabic NLP tasks despite the limited training data. AlcLaM is available at GitHub https://github.com/amurtadha/Alclam and HuggingFace https://huggingface.co/rahbi.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for a wide range of language generation tasks. Nevertheless, this progress has been slower in Arabic. In this work, we focus on the task of generating stories from LLMs. For our training, we use stories acquired through machine translation (MT) as well as GPT-4. For the MT data, we develop a careful pipeline that ensures we acquire high-quality stories. For our GPT-41 data, we introduce crafted prompts that allow us to generate data well-suited to the Arabic context in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and two Arabic dialects (Egyptian and Moroccan). For example, we generate stories tailored to various Arab countries on a wide host of topics. Our manual evaluation shows that our model fine-tuned on these training datasets can generate coherent stories that adhere to our instructions. We also conduct an extensive automatic and human evaluation comparing our models against state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models. Our datasets and models will be made publicly available at https: //github.com/UBC-NLP/arastories.

Spelling correction is the task of identifying spelling mistakes, typos, and grammatical mistakes in a given text and correcting them according to their context and grammatical structure. This work introduces "AraSpell," a framework for Arabic spelling correction using different seq2seq model architectures such as Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Transformer with artificial data generation for error injection, trained on more than 6.9 Million Arabic sentences. Thorough experimental studies provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which achieved 4.8% and 1.11% word error rate (WER) and character error rate (CER), respectively, in comparison with labeled data of 29.72% WER and 5.03% CER. Our approach achieved 2.9% CER and 10.65% WER in comparison with labeled data of 10.02% CER and 50.94% WER. Both of these results are obtained on a test set of 100K sentences.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is essential for integrating external knowledge into Large Language Model (LLM) outputs. While the literature on RAG is growing, it primarily focuses on systematic reviews and comparisons of new state-of-the-art (SoTA) techniques against their predecessors, with a gap in extensive experimental comparisons. This study begins to address this gap by assessing various RAG methods' impacts on retrieval precision and answer similarity. We found that Hypothetical Document Embedding (HyDE) and LLM reranking significantly enhance retrieval precision. However, Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) and Cohere rerank did not exhibit notable advantages over a baseline Naive RAG system, and Multi-query approaches underperformed. Sentence Window Retrieval emerged as the most effective for retrieval precision, despite its variable performance on answer similarity. The study confirms the potential of the Document Summary Index as a competent retrieval approach. All resources related to this research are publicly accessible for further investigation through our GitHub repository ARAGOG (https://github.com/predlico/ARAGOG). We welcome the community to further this exploratory study in RAG systems.

In this paper, we address the significant gap in Arabic natural language processing (NLP) resources by introducing ArabicaQA, the first large-scale dataset for machine reading comprehension and open-domain question answering in Arabic. This comprehensive dataset, consisting of 89,095 answerable and 3,701 unanswerable questions created by crowdworkers to look similar to answerable ones, along with additional labels of open-domain questions marks a crucial advancement in Arabic NLP resources. We also present AraDPR, the first dense passage retrieval model trained on the Arabic Wikipedia corpus, specifically designed to tackle the unique challenges of Arabic text retrieval. Furthermore, our study includes extensive benchmarking of large language models (LLMs) for Arabic question answering, critically evaluating their performance in the Arabic language context. In conclusion, ArabicaQA, AraDPR, and the benchmarking of LLMs in Arabic question answering offer significant advancements in the field of Arabic NLP. The dataset and code are publicly accessible for further research https://github.com/DataScienceUIBK/ArabicaQA.

Arabic poetry, with its rich linguistic features and profound cultural significance, presents a unique challenge to the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. The complexity of its structure and context necessitates advanced computational models for accurate analysis. In this paper, we introduce AraPoemBERT, an Arabic language model pretrained exclusively on Arabic poetry text. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, we compared AraPoemBERT with 5 different Arabic language models on various NLP tasks related to Arabic poetry. The new model outperformed all other models and achieved state-of-the-art results in most of the downstream tasks. AraPoemBERT achieved unprecedented accuracy in two out of three novel tasks: poet's gender classification (99.34\% accuracy), and poetry sub-meter classification (97.79\% accuracy). In addition, the model achieved an accuracy score in poems' rhyme classification (97.73\% accuracy) which is almost equivalent to the best score reported in this study. Moreover, the proposed model significantly outperformed previous work and other comparative models in the tasks of poems' sentiment analysis, achieving an accuracy of 78.95\%, and poetry meter classification (99.03\% accuracy), while significantly expanding the scope of these two problems. The dataset used in this study, contains more than 2.09 million verses collected from online sources, each associated with various attributes such as meter, sub-meter, poet, rhyme, and topic. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in understanding and analyzing Arabic poetry, achieving state-of-the-art results in several tasks and outperforming previous works and other language models included in the study. AraPoemBERT model is publicly available on https://huggingface.co/faisalq.

The swift progress and widespread acceptance of artificial intelligence (AI) systems highlight a pressing requirement to comprehend both the capabilities and potential risks associated with AI. Given the linguistic complexity, cultural richness, and underrepresented status of Arabic in AI research, there is a pressing need to focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) performance and safety for Arabic-related tasks. Despite some progress in their development, there is a lack of comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation benchmarks, which presents a major challenge in accurately assessing and improving the safety of LLMs when prompted in Arabic. In this paper, we introduce AraTrust, the first comprehensive trustworthiness benchmark for LLMs in Arabic. AraTrust comprises 522 human-written multiple-choice questions addressing diverse dimensions related to truthfulness, ethics, safety, physical health, mental health, unfairness, illegal activities, privacy, and offensive language. We evaluated a set of LLMs against our benchmark to assess their trustworthiness. GPT-4 was the most trustworthy LLM, while open-source models, particularly AceGPT 7B and Jais 13B, struggled to achieve a score of 60% in our benchmark.

Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI) has been a hot research topic in the last few years that could help paralyzed people in their lives. Several researches were done to classify electroencephalography (EEG) signals automatically into English characters and words. Arabic language is one of the most used languages around the world. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no dataset for Arabic characters EEG signals. In this paper, we have created an EEG dataset for Arabic characters and named it ArEEG_Chars. Moreover, several experiments were done on ArEEG_Chars using deep learning. Best results were achieved using LSTM and reached an accuracy of 97%. ArEEG_Chars dataset will be public for researchers.

This study presents AraSpider, the first Arabic version of the Spider dataset, aimed at improving natural language processing (NLP) in the Arabic-speaking community. Four multilingual translation models were tested for their effectiveness in translating English to Arabic. Additionally, two models were assessed for their ability to generate SQL queries from Arabic text. The results showed that using back translation significantly improved the performance of both ChatGPT 3.5 and SQLCoder models, which are considered top performers on the Spider dataset. Notably, ChatGPT 3.5 demonstrated high-quality translation, while SQLCoder excelled in text-to-SQL tasks. The study underscores the importance of incorporating contextual schema and employing back translation strategies to enhance model performance in Arabic NLP tasks. Moreover, the provision of detailed methodologies for reproducibility and translation of the dataset into other languages highlights the research's commitment to promoting transparency and collaborative knowledge sharing in the field. Overall, these contributions advance NLP research, empower Arabic-speaking researchers, and enrich the global discourse on language comprehension and database interrogation.

This paper presents the first Arabic crossword puzzle generator driven by advanced AI technology. Leveraging cutting-edge large language models including GPT4, GPT3-Davinci, GPT3-Curie, GPT3-Babbage, GPT3-Ada, and BERT, the system generates distinctive and challenging clues. Based on a dataset comprising over 50,000 clue-answer pairs, the generator employs fine-tuning, few/zero-shot learning strategies, and rigorous quality-checking protocols to enforce the generation of high-quality clue-answer pairs. Importantly, educational crosswords contribute to enhancing memory, expanding vocabulary, and promoting problem-solving skills, thereby augmenting the learning experience through a fun and engaging approach, reshaping the landscape of traditional learning methods. The overall system can be exploited as a powerful educational tool that amalgamates AI and innovative learning techniques, heralding a transformative era for Arabic crossword puzzles and the intersection of technology and education.

Arabic is a complex language with many varieties and dialects spoken by over 450 millions all around the world. Due to the linguistic diversity and variations, it is challenging to build a robust and generalized ASR system for Arabic. In this work, we address this gap by developing and demoing a system, dubbed VoxArabica, for dialect identification (DID) as well as automatic speech recognition (ASR) of Arabic. We train a wide range of models such as HuBERT (DID), Whisper, and XLS-R (ASR) in a supervised setting for Arabic DID and ASR tasks. Our DID models are trained to identify 17 different dialects in addition to MSA. We finetune our ASR models on MSA, Egyptian, Moroccan, and mixed data. Additionally, for the remaining dialects in ASR, we provide the option to choose various models such as Whisper and MMS in a zero-shot setting. We integrate these models into a single web interface with diverse features such as audio recording, file upload, model selection, and the option to raise flags for incorrect outputs. Overall, we believe VoxArabica will be useful for a wide range of audiences concerned with Arabic research. Our system is currently running at https://cdce-206-12-100-168.ngrok.io/.

Poetry holds immense significance within the cultural and traditional fabric of any nation. It serves as a vehicle for poets to articulate their emotions, preserve customs, and convey the essence of their culture. Arabic poetry is no exception, having played a cherished role in the heritage of the Arabic community throughout history and maintaining its relevance in the present era. Typically, comprehending Arabic poetry necessitates the expertise of a linguist who can analyze its content and assess its quality. This paper presents the introduction of a framework called Ashaar https://github.com/ARBML/Ashaar, which encompasses a collection of datasets and pre-trained models designed specifically for the analysis and generation of Arabic poetry. The pipeline established within our proposed approach encompasses various aspects of poetry, such as meter, theme, and era classification. It also incorporates automatic poetry diacritization, enabling more intricate analyses like automated extraction of the Arudi style. Additionally, we explore the feasibility of generating conditional poetry through the pre-training of a character-based GPT model. Furthermore, as part of this endeavor, we provide four datasets: one for poetry generation, another for diacritization, and two for Arudi-style prediction. These datasets aim to facilitate research and development in the field of Arabic poetry by enabling researchers and enthusiasts to delve into the nuances of this rich literary tradition.

Arabic dialect identification (ADI) tools are an important part of the large-scale data collection pipelines necessary for training speech recognition models. As these pipelines require application of ADI tools to potentially out-of-domain data, we aim to investigate how vulnerable the tools may be to this domain shift. With self-supervised learning (SSL) models as a starting point, we evaluate transfer learning and direct classification from SSL features. We undertake our evaluation under rich conditions, with a goal to develop ADI systems from pretrained models and ultimately evaluate performance on newly collected data. In order to understand what factors contribute to model decisions, we carry out a careful human study of a subset of our data. Our analysis confirms that domain shift is a major challenge for ADI models. We also find that while self-training does alleviate this challenges, it may be insufficient for realistic conditions.

Spoken keyword spotting (KWS) is the task of identifying a keyword in an audio stream and is widely used in smart devices at the edge in order to activate voice assistants and perform hands-free tasks. The task is daunting as there is a need, on the one hand, to achieve high accuracy while at the same time ensuring that such systems continue to run efficiently on low power and possibly limited computational capabilities devices. This work presents AraSpot for Arabic keyword spotting trained on 40 Arabic keywords, using different online data augmentation, and introducing ConformerGRU model architecture. Finally, we further improve the performance of the model by training a text-to-speech model for synthetic data generation. AraSpot achieved a State-of-the-Art SOTA 99.59% result outperforming previous approaches.

Arabic language lacks semantic datasets and sense inventories. The most common semantically-labeled dataset for Arabic is the ArabGlossBERT, a relatively small dataset that consists of 167K context-gloss pairs (about 60K positive and 107K negative pairs), collected from Arabic dictionaries. This paper presents an enrichment to the ArabGlossBERT dataset, by augmenting it using (Arabic-English-Arabic) machine back-translation. Augmentation increased the dataset size to 352K pairs (149K positive and 203K negative pairs). We measure the impact of augmentation using different data configurations to fine-tune BERT on target sense verification (TSV) task. Overall, the accuracy ranges between 78% to 84% for different data configurations. Although our approach performed at par with the baseline, we did observe some improvements for some POS tags in some experiments. Furthermore, our fine-tuned models are trained on a larger dataset covering larger vocabulary and contexts. We provide an in-depth analysis of the accuracy for each part-of-speech (POS).

The effectiveness of the BERT model on multiple linguistic tasks has been well documented. On the other hand, its potentials for narrow and specific domains such as Legal, have not been fully explored. In this paper, we examine how BERT can be used in the Arabic legal domain and try customizing this language model for several downstream tasks using several different domain-relevant training and testing datasets to train BERT from scratch. We introduce the AraLegal-BERT, a bidirectional encoder Transformer-based model that have been thoroughly tested and carefully optimized with the goal to amplify the impact of NLP-driven solution concerning jurisprudence, legal documents, and legal practice. We fine-tuned AraLegal-BERT and evaluated it against three BERT variations for Arabic language in three natural languages understanding (NLU) tasks. The results show that the base version of AraLegal-BERT achieve better accuracy than the general and original BERT over the Legal text.

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a hot topic research in natural language processing, contradiction detection between sentences is a special case of NLI. This is considered a difficult NLP task which has a big influence when added as a component in many NLP applications, such as Question Answering Systems, text Summarization. Arabic Language is one of the most challenging low-resources languages in detecting contradictions due to its rich lexical, semantics ambiguity. We have created a data set of more than 12k sentences and named ArNLI, that will be publicly available. Moreover, we have applied a new model inspired by Stanford contradiction detection proposed solutions on English language. We proposed an approach to detect contradictions between pairs of sentences in Arabic language using contradiction vector combined with language model vector as an input to machine learning model. We analyzed results of different traditional machine learning classifiers and compared their results on our created data set (ArNLI) and on an automatic translation of both PHEME, SICK English data sets. Best results achieved using Random Forest classifier with an accuracy of 99%, 60%, 75% on PHEME, SICK and ArNLI respectively.

Choosing optimal maskers for existing soundscapes to effect a desired perceptual change via soundscape augmentation is non-trivial due to extensive varieties of maskers and a dearth of benchmark datasets with which to compare and develop soundscape augmentation models. To address this problem, we make publicly available the ARAUS (Affective Responses to Augmented Urban Soundscapes) dataset, which comprises a five-fold cross-validation set and independent test set totaling 25,440 unique subjective perceptual responses to augmented soundscapes presented as audio-visual stimuli. Each augmented soundscape is made by digitally adding "maskers" (bird, water, wind, traffic, construction, or silence) to urban soundscape recordings at fixed soundscape-to-masker ratios. Responses were then collected by asking participants to rate how pleasant, annoying, eventful, uneventful, vibrant, monotonous, chaotic, calm, and appropriate each augmented soundscape was, in accordance with ISO 12913-2:2018. Participants also provided relevant demographic information and completed standard psychological questionnaires. We perform exploratory and statistical analysis of the responses obtained to verify internal consistency and agreement with known results in the literature. Finally, we demonstrate the benchmarking capability of the dataset by training and comparing four baseline models for urban soundscape pleasantness: a low-parameter regression model, a high-parameter convolutional neural network, and two attention-based networks in the literature.

Using pre-trained transformer models such as BERT has proven to be effective in many NLP tasks. This paper presents our work to fine-tune BERT models for Arabic Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). We treated the WSD task as a sentence-pair binary classification task. First, we constructed a dataset of labeled Arabic context-gloss pairs (~167k pairs) we extracted from the Arabic Ontology and the large lexicographic database available at Birzeit University. Each pair was labeled as True or False and target words in each context were identified and annotated. Second, we used this dataset for fine-tuning three pre-trained Arabic BERT models. Third, we experimented the use of different supervised signals used to emphasize target words in context. Our experiments achieved promising results (accuracy of 84%) although we used a large set of senses in the experiment.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious respiratory disease that was first discovered in late December 2019, in Wuhan, China, and then spread worldwide causing a lot of panic and death. Users of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been focused on reading, publishing, and sharing novelties, tweets, and articles regarding the newly emerging pandemic. A lot of these users often employ sarcasm to convey their intended meaning in a humorous, funny, and indirect way making it hard for computer-based applications to automatically understand and identify their goal and the harm level that they can inflect. Motivated by the emerging need for annotated datasets that tackle these kinds of problems in the context of COVID-19, this paper builds and releases AraCOVID19-SSD a manually annotated Arabic COVID-19 sarcasm and sentiment detection dataset containing 5,162 tweets. To confirm the practical utility of the built dataset, it has been carefully analyzed and tested using several classification models.

Transfer learning with a unified Transformer framework (T5) that converts all language problems into a text-to-text format was recently proposed as a simple and effective transfer learning approach. Although a multilingual version of the T5 model (mT5) was also introduced, it is not clear how well it can fare on non-English tasks involving diverse data. To investigate this question, we apply mT5 on a language with a wide variety of dialects--Arabic. For evaluation, we introduce a novel benchmark for ARabic language GENeration (ARGEN), covering seven important tasks. For model comparison, we pre-train three powerful Arabic T5-style models and evaluate them on ARGEN. Although pre-trained with ~49 less data, our new models perform significantly better than mT5 on all ARGEN tasks (in 52 out of 59 test sets) and set several new SOTAs. Our models also establish new SOTA on the recently-proposed, large Arabic language understanding evaluation benchmark ARLUE (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2021). Our new models are publicly available. We also link to ARGEN datasets through our repository: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/araT5.

Along with the COVID-19 pandemic, an "infodemic" of false and misleading information has emerged and has complicated the COVID-19 response efforts. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have contributed largely to the spread of rumors, conspiracy theories, hate, xenophobia, racism, and prejudice. To combat the spread of fake news, researchers around the world have and are still making considerable efforts to build and share COVID-19 related research articles, models, and datasets. This paper releases "AraCOVID19-MFH" a manually annotated multi-label Arabic COVID-19 fake news and hate speech detection dataset. Our dataset contains 10,828 Arabic tweets annotated with 10 different labels. The labels have been designed to consider some aspects relevant to the fact-checking task, such as the tweet's check worthiness, positivity/negativity, and factuality. To confirm our annotated dataset's practical utility, we used it to train and evaluate several classification models and reported the obtained results. Though the dataset is mainly designed for fake news detection, it can also be used for hate speech detection, opinion/news classification, dialect identification, and many other tasks.

With the continuing spread of misinformation and disinformation online, it is of increasing importance to develop combating mechanisms at scale in the form of automated systems that support multiple languages. One task of interest is claim veracity prediction, which can be addressed using stance detection with respect to relevant documents retrieved online. To this end, we present our new Arabic Stance Detection dataset (AraStance) of 4,063 claim--article pairs from a diverse set of sources comprising three fact-checking websites and one news website. AraStance covers false and true claims from multiple domains (e.g., politics, sports, health) and several Arab countries, and it is well-balanced between related and unrelated documents with respect to the claims. We benchmark AraStance, along with two other stance detection datasets, using a number of BERT-based models. Our best model achieves an accuracy of 85\% and a macro F1 score of 78\%, which leaves room for improvement and reflects the challenging nature of AraStance and the task of stance detection in general.

Recently, pre-trained transformer-based architectures have proven to be very efficient at language modeling and understanding, given that they are trained on a large enough corpus. Applications in language generation for Arabic are still lagging in comparison to other NLP advances primarily due to the lack of advanced Arabic language generation models. In this paper, we develop the first advanced Arabic language generation model, AraGPT2, trained from scratch on a large Arabic corpus of internet text and news articles. Our largest model, AraGPT2-mega, has 1.46 billion parameters, which makes it the largest Arabic language model available. The Mega model was evaluated and showed success on different tasks including synthetic news generation, and zero-shot question answering. For text generation, our best model achieves a perplexity of 29.8 on held-out Wikipedia articles. A study conducted with human evaluators showed the significant success of AraGPT2-mega in generating news articles that are difficult to distinguish from articles written by humans. We thus develop and release an automatic discriminator model with a 98% percent accuracy in detecting model-generated text. The models are also publicly available, hoping to encourage new research directions and applications for Arabic NLP.

Arabic dialect identification is a complex problem for a number of inherent properties of the language itself. In this paper, we present the experiments conducted, and the models developed by our competing team, Mawdoo3 AI, along the way to achieving our winning solution to subtask 1 of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task. The dialect identification subtask provides 21,000 country-level labeled tweets covering all 21 Arab countries. An unlabeled corpus of 10M tweets from the same domain is also presented by the competition organizers for optional use. Our winning solution itself came in the form of an ensemble of different training iterations of our pre-trained BERT model, which achieved a micro-averaged F1-score of 26.78% on the subtask at hand. We publicly release the pre-trained language model component of our winning solution under the name of Multi-dialect-Arabic-BERT model, for any interested researcher out there.

Classical and some deep learning techniques for Arabic text classification often depend on complex morphological analysis, word segmentation, and hand-crafted feature engineering. These could be eliminated by using character-level features. We propose a novel end-to-end Arabic document classification framework, Arabic document image-based classifier (AraDIC), inspired by the work on image-based character embeddings. AraDIC consists of an image-based character encoder and a classifier. They are trained in an end-to-end fashion using the class balanced loss to deal with the long-tailed data distribution problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of AraDIC, we created and published two datasets, the Arabic Wikipedia title (AWT) dataset and the Arabic poetry (AraP) dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first image-based character embedding framework addressing the problem of Arabic text classification. We also present the first deep learning-based text classifier widely evaluated on modern standard Arabic, colloquial Arabic and classical Arabic. AraDIC shows performance improvement over classical and deep learning baselines by 12.29% and 23.05% for the micro and macro F-score, respectively.

We present QADI, an automatically collected dataset of tweets belonging to a wide range of country-level Arabic dialects -covering 18 different countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. Our method for building this dataset relies on applying multiple filters to identify users who belong to different countries based on their account descriptions and to eliminate tweets that are either written in Modern Standard Arabic or contain inappropriate language. The resultant dataset contains 540k tweets from 2,525 users who are evenly distributed across 18 Arab countries. Using intrinsic evaluation, we show that the labels of a set of randomly selected tweets are 91.5% accurate. For extrinsic evaluation, we are able to build effective country-level dialect identification on tweets with a macro-averaged F1-score of 60.6% across 18 classes.

Detecting offensive language on Twitter has many applications ranging from detecting/predicting bullying to measuring polarization. In this paper, we focus on building a large Arabic offensive tweet dataset. We introduce a method for building a dataset that is not biased by topic, dialect, or target. We produce the largest Arabic dataset to date with special tags for vulgarity and hate speech. We thoroughly analyze the dataset to determine which topics, dialects, and gender are most associated with offensive tweets and how Arabic speakers use offensive language. Lastly, we conduct many experiments to produce strong results (F1 = 83.2) on the dataset using SOTA techniques.

Diacritization of Arabic text is both an interesting and a challenging problem at the same time with various applications ranging from speech synthesis to helping students learning the Arabic language. Like many other tasks or problems in Arabic language processing, the weak efforts invested into this problem and the lack of available (open-source) resources hinder the progress towards solving this problem. This work provides a critical review for the currently existing systems, measures and resources for Arabic text diacritization. Moreover, it introduces a much-needed free-for-all cleaned dataset that can be easily used to benchmark any work on Arabic diacritization. Extracted from the Tashkeela Corpus, the dataset consists of 55K lines containing about 2.3M words. After constructing the dataset, existing tools and systems are tested on it. The results of the experiments show that the neural Shakkala system significantly outperforms traditional rule-based approaches and other closed-source tools with a Diacritic Error Rate (DER) of 2.88% compared with 13.78%, which the best DER for the non-neural approach (obtained by the Mishkal tool).

Arabic word segmentation is essential for a variety of NLP applications such as machine translation and information retrieval. Segmentation entails breaking words into their constituent stems, affixes and clitics. In this paper, we compare two approaches for segmenting four major Arabic dialects using only several thousand training examples for each dialect. The two approaches involve posing the problem as a ranking problem, where an SVM ranker picks the best segmentation, and as a sequence labeling problem, where a bi-LSTM RNN coupled with CRF determines where best to segment words. We are able to achieve solid segmentation results for all dialects using rather limited training data. We also show that employing Modern Standard Arabic data for domain adaptation and assuming context independence improve overall results.

We present Hala, a family of Arabic-centric instruction and translation models built with our translate-and-tune pipeline. We first compress a strong ARleftrightarrowEN teacher to FP8 (yielding sim2times higher throughput with no quality loss) and use it to create high-fidelity bilingual supervision. A lightweight language model LFM2-1.2B is then fine-tuned on this data and used to translate high-quality English instruction sets into Arabic, producing a million-scale corpus tailored to instruction following. We train Hala models at 350M, 700M, 1.2B, and 9B parameters, and apply slerp merging to balance Arabic specialization with base-model strengths. On Arabic-centric benchmarks, Hala achieves state-of-the-art results within both the "nano" (leq2B) and "small" (7-9B) categories, outperforming their bases. We release models, data, evaluation, and recipes to accelerate research in Arabic NLP.

The performance of large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) depends heavily on the quality and scale of their pre-training datasets. Recent research shows that large multimodal models trained on natural documents where images and text are interleaved outperform those trained only on image-text pairs across a wide range of benchmarks, leveraging advanced pre- trained models to enforce semantic alignment, image-sequence consistency, and textual coherence. For Arabic, however, the lack of high-quality multimodal datasets that preserve document structure has limited progress. In this paper, we present our pipeline Wasm for processing the Common Crawl dataset to create a new Arabic multimodal dataset that uniquely provides markdown output. Unlike existing Arabic corpora that focus solely on text extraction, our approach preserves the structural integrity of web content while maintaining flexibility for both text-only and multimodal pre-training scenarios. We provide a comprehensive comparative analysis of our data processing pipeline against those used for major existing datasets, highlighting the convergences in filtering strategies and justifying our specific design choices. To support future research, we publicly release a representative dataset dump along with the multimodal processing pipeline for Arabic.

Classical Arabic represents a significant era, encompassing the golden age of Arab culture, philosophy, and scientific literature. With a broad consensus on the importance of translating these literatures to enrich knowledge dissemination across communities, the advent of large language models (LLMs) and translation systems offers promising tools to facilitate this goal. However, we have identified a scarcity of translation datasets in Classical Arabic, which are often limited in scope and topics, hindering the development of high-quality translation systems. In response, we present the ATHAR dataset, comprising 66,000 high-quality Classical Arabic to English translation samples that cover a wide array of subjects including science, culture, and philosophy. Furthermore, we assess the performance of current state-of-the-art LLMs under various settings, concluding that there is a need for such datasets in current systems. Our findings highlight how models can benefit from fine-tuning or incorporating this dataset into their pretraining pipelines. The dataset is publicly available on the HuggingFace Data Hub at https://huggingface.co/datasets/mohamed-khalil/ATHAR.

Amid the swift progress of large language models (LLMs) and their evolution into large multimodal models (LMMs), significant strides have been made in high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. While Arabic LLMs have seen notable progress, Arabic LMMs remain largely unexplored, often narrowly focusing on a few specific aspects of the language and visual understanding. To bridge this gap, we introduce AIN-the Arabic Inclusive Multimodal Model-designed to excel across diverse domains. AIN is an English-Arabic bilingual LMM designed to excel in English and Arabic, leveraging carefully constructed 3.6 million high-quality Arabic-English multimodal data samples. AIN demonstrates state-of-the-art Arabic performance, while also possessing strong English-language visual capabilities. On the recent CAMEL-Bench benchmark comprising 38 sub-domains including, multi-image understanding, complex visual perception, handwritten document understanding, video understanding, medical imaging, plant diseases, and remote sensing-based land use understanding, our AIN demonstrates strong performance with the 7B model outperforming GPT-4o by an absolute gain of 3.4% averaged over eight domains and 38 sub-domains. AIN's superior capabilities position it as a significant step toward empowering Arabic speakers with advanced multimodal generative AI tools across diverse applications.

Recent advancements have significantly enhanced the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in generating and understanding image-to-text content. Despite these successes, progress is predominantly limited to English due to the scarcity of high quality multimodal resources in other languages. This limitation impedes the development of competitive models in languages such as Arabic. To alleviate this situation, we introduce an efficient Arabic multimodal assistant, dubbed Dallah, that utilizes an advanced language model based on LLaMA-2 to facilitate multimodal interactions. Dallah demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in Arabic MLLMs. Through fine-tuning six Arabic dialects, Dallah showcases its capability to handle complex dialectal interactions incorporating both textual and visual elements. The model excels in two benchmark tests: one evaluating its performance on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and another specifically designed to assess dialectal responses. Beyond its robust performance in multimodal interaction tasks, Dallah has the potential to pave the way for further development of dialect-aware Arabic MLLMs.

This study addresses the critical gap in Arabic natural language processing by developing an effective Arabic Reverse Dictionary (RD) system that enables users to find words based on their descriptions or meanings. We present a novel transformer-based approach with a semi-encoder neural network architecture featuring geometrically decreasing layers that achieves state-of-the-art results for Arabic RD tasks. Our methodology incorporates a comprehensive dataset construction process and establishes formal quality standards for Arabic lexicographic definitions. Experiments with various pre-trained models demonstrate that Arabic-specific models significantly outperform general multilingual embeddings, with ARBERTv2 achieving the best ranking score (0.0644). Additionally, we provide a formal abstraction of the reverse dictionary task that enhances theoretical understanding and develop a modular, extensible Python library (RDTL) with configurable training pipelines. Our analysis of dataset quality reveals important insights for improving Arabic definition construction, leading to eight specific standards for building high-quality reverse dictionary resources. This work contributes significantly to Arabic computational linguistics and provides valuable tools for language learning, academic writing, and professional communication in Arabic.

We present ALLaM: Arabic Large Language Model, a series of large language models to support the ecosystem of Arabic Language Technologies (ALT). ALLaM is carefully trained considering the values of language alignment and knowledge transfer at scale. Our autoregressive decoder-only architecture models demonstrate how second-language acquisition via vocabulary expansion and pretraining on a mixture of Arabic and English text can steer a model towards a new language (Arabic) without any catastrophic forgetting in the original language (English). Furthermore, we highlight the effectiveness of using parallel/translated data to aid the process of knowledge alignment between languages. Finally, we show that extensive alignment with human preferences can significantly enhance the performance of a language model compared to models of a larger scale with lower quality alignment. ALLaM achieves state-of-the-art performance in various Arabic benchmarks, including MMLU Arabic, ACVA, and Arabic Exams. Our aligned models improve both in Arabic and English from their base aligned models.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is crucial for human-machine interaction in diverse applications like conversational agents, industrial robotics, call center automation, and automated subtitling. However, developing high-performance ASR models remains challenging, particularly for low-resource languages like Arabic, due to the scarcity of large, labeled speech datasets, which are costly and labor-intensive to produce. In this work, we employ weakly supervised learning to train an Arabic ASR model using the Conformer architecture. Our model is trained from scratch on 15,000 hours of weakly annotated speech data covering both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA), eliminating the need for costly manual transcriptions. Despite the absence of human-verified labels, our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in Arabic ASR, surpassing both open and closed-source models on standard benchmarks. By demonstrating the effectiveness of weak supervision as a scalable, cost-efficient alternative to traditional supervised approaches, paving the way for improved ASR systems in low resource settings.

We present ArTST, a pre-trained Arabic text and speech transformer for supporting open-source speech technologies for the Arabic language. The model architecture follows the unified-modal framework, SpeechT5, that was recently released for English, and is focused on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), with plans to extend the model for dialectal and code-switched Arabic in future editions. We pre-trained the model from scratch on MSA speech and text data, and fine-tuned it for the following tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech synthesis (TTS), and spoken dialect identification. In our experiments comparing ArTST with SpeechT5, as well as with previously reported results in these tasks, ArTST performs on a par with or exceeding the current state-of-the-art in all three tasks. Moreover, we find that our pre-training is conducive for generalization, which is particularly evident in the low-resource TTS task. The pre-trained model as well as the fine-tuned ASR and TTS models are released for research use.

This survey provides the first systematic review of Arabic LLM benchmarks, analyzing 40+ evaluation benchmarks across NLP tasks, knowledge domains, cultural understanding, and specialized capabilities. We propose a taxonomy organizing benchmarks into four categories: Knowledge, NLP Tasks, Culture and Dialects, and Target-Specific evaluations. Our analysis reveals significant progress in benchmark diversity while identifying critical gaps: limited temporal evaluation, insufficient multi-turn dialogue assessment, and cultural misalignment in translated datasets. We examine three primary approaches: native collection, translation, and synthetic generation discussing their trade-offs regarding authenticity, scale, and cost. This work serves as a comprehensive reference for Arabic NLP researchers, providing insights into benchmark methodologies, reproducibility standards, and evaluation metrics while offering recommendations for future development.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented capabilities in generating human-like text, posing subtle yet significant challenges for information integrity across critical domains, including education, social media, and academia, enabling sophisticated misinformation campaigns, compromising healthcare guidance, and facilitating targeted propaganda. This challenge becomes severe, particularly in under-explored and low-resource languages like Arabic. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of Arabic machine-generated text, examining multiple generation strategies (generation from the title only, content-aware generation, and text refinement) across diverse model architectures (ALLaM, Jais, Llama, and GPT-4) in academic, and social media domains. Our stylometric analysis reveals distinctive linguistic patterns differentiating human-written from machine-generated Arabic text across these varied contexts. Despite their human-like qualities, we demonstrate that LLMs produce detectable signatures in their Arabic outputs, with domain-specific characteristics that vary significantly between different contexts. Based on these insights, we developed BERT-based detection models that achieved exceptional performance in formal contexts (up to 99.9\% F1-score) with strong precision across model architectures. Our cross-domain analysis confirms generalization challenges previously reported in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the most comprehensive investigation of Arabic machine-generated text to date, uniquely combining multiple prompt generation methods, diverse model architectures, and in-depth stylometric analysis across varied textual domains, establishing a foundation for developing robust, linguistically-informed detection systems essential for preserving information integrity in Arabic-language contexts.

Dialectal Arabic (DA) poses a persistent challenge for natural language processing (NLP), as most everyday communication in the Arab world occurs in dialects that diverge significantly from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). This linguistic divide limits access to digital services and educational resources and impedes progress in Arabic machine translation. This paper presents two core contributions to advancing DA-MSA translation for the Levantine, Egyptian, and Gulf dialects, particularly in low-resource and computationally constrained settings: a comprehensive evaluation of training-free prompting techniques, and the development of a resource-efficient fine-tuning pipeline. Our evaluation of prompting strategies across six large language models (LLMs) found that few-shot prompting consistently outperformed zero-shot, chain-of-thought, and our proposed Ara-TEaR method. GPT-4o achieved the highest performance across all prompting settings. For fine-tuning, a quantized Gemma2-9B model achieved a CHrF++ score of 49.88, outperforming zero-shot GPT-4o (44.58). Joint multi-dialect trained models outperformed single-dialect counterparts by over 10% CHrF++, and 4-bit quantization reduced memory usage by 60% with less than 1% performance loss. The results and insights of our experiments offer a practical blueprint for improving dialectal inclusion in Arabic NLP, showing that high-quality DA-MSA machine translation is achievable even with limited resources and paving the way for more inclusive language technologies.

We present an Arabic crossword puzzle generator from a given text that utilizes advanced language models such as GPT-4-Turbo, GPT-3.5-Turbo and Llama3-8B-Instruct, specifically developed for educational purposes, this innovative generator leverages a meticulously compiled dataset named Arabic-Clue-Instruct with over 50,000 entries encompassing text, answers, clues, and categories. This dataset is intricately designed to aid in the generation of pertinent clues linked to specific texts and keywords within defined categories. This project addresses the scarcity of advanced educational tools tailored for the Arabic language, promoting enhanced language learning and cognitive development. By providing a culturally and linguistically relevant tool, our objective is to make learning more engaging and effective through gamification and interactivity. Integrating state-of-the-art artificial intelligence with contemporary learning methodologies, this tool can generate crossword puzzles from any given educational text, thereby facilitating an interactive and enjoyable learning experience. This tool not only advances educational paradigms but also sets a new standard in interactive and cognitive learning technologies. The model and dataset are publicly available.

In multi-label emotion classification, particularly for low-resource languages like Arabic, the challenges of class imbalance and label correlation hinder model performance, especially in accurately predicting minority emotions. To address these issues, this study proposes a novel approach that combines stacked embeddings, meta-learning, and a hybrid loss function to enhance multi-label emotion classification for the Arabic language. The study extracts contextual embeddings from three fine-tuned language models-ArabicBERT, MarBERT, and AraBERT-which are then stacked to form enriched embeddings. A meta-learner is trained on these stacked embeddings, and the resulting concatenated representations are provided as input to a Bi-LSTM model, followed by a fully connected neural network for multi-label classification. To further improve performance, a hybrid loss function is introduced, incorporating class weighting, label correlation matrix, and contrastive learning, effectively addressing class imbalances and improving the handling of label correlations. Extensive experiments validate the proposed model's performance across key metrics such as Precision, Recall, F1-Score, Jaccard Accuracy, and Hamming Loss. The class-wise performance analysis demonstrates the hybrid loss function's ability to significantly reduce disparities between majority and minority classes, resulting in a more balanced emotion classification. An ablation study highlights the contribution of each component, showing the superiority of the model compared to baseline approaches and other loss functions. This study not only advances multi-label emotion classification for Arabic but also presents a generalizable framework that can be adapted to other languages and domains, providing a significant step forward in addressing the challenges of low-resource emotion classification tasks.

Understanding Arabic text and generating human-like responses is a challenging endeavor. While many researchers have proposed models and solutions for individual problems, there is an acute shortage of a comprehensive Arabic natural language generation toolkit that is capable of handling a wide range of tasks. In this work, we present a novel Arabic text-to-text Transformer model, namely AraT5v2. Our new model is methodically trained on extensive and diverse data, utilizing an extended sequence length of 2,048 tokens. We explore various pretraining strategies including unsupervised, supervised, and joint pertaining, under both single and multitask settings. Our models outperform competitive baselines with large margins. We take our work one step further by developing and publicly releasing Octopus, a Python-based package and command-line toolkit tailored for eight Arabic generation tasks all exploiting a single model. We release the models and the toolkit on our public repository.

This paper presents a dataset for closest opposite questions in Arabic language. The dataset is the first of its kind for the Arabic language. It is beneficial for the assessment of systems on the aspect of antonymy detection. The structure is similar to that of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) closest opposite questions dataset for the English language. The introduced dataset consists of 500 questions, each contains a query word for which the closest opposite needs to be determined from among a set of candidate words. Each question is also associated with the correct answer. We publish the dataset publicly in addition to providing standard splits of the dataset into development and test sets. Moreover, the paper provides a benchmark for the performance of different Arabic word embedding models on the introduced dataset.

Epigraphy increasingly turns to modern artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning (ML) for extracting insights from ancient inscriptions. However, scarce labeled data for training ML algorithms severely limits current techniques, especially for ancient scripts like Old Aramaic. Our research pioneers an innovative methodology for generating synthetic training data tailored to Old Aramaic letters. Our pipeline synthesizes photo-realistic Aramaic letter datasets, incorporating textural features, lighting, damage, and augmentations to mimic real-world inscription diversity. Despite minimal real examples, we engineer a dataset of 250,000 training and 25,000 validation images covering the 22 letter classes in the Aramaic alphabet. This comprehensive corpus provides a robust volume of data for training a residual neural network (ResNet) to classify highly degraded Aramaic letters. The ResNet model demonstrates high accuracy in classifying real images from the 8th century BCE Hadad statue inscription. Additional experiments validate performance on varying materials and styles, proving effective generalization. Our results validate the model's capabilities in handling diverse real-world scenarios, proving the viability of our synthetic data approach and avoiding the dependence on scarce training data that has constrained epigraphic analysis. Our innovative framework elevates interpretation accuracy on damaged inscriptions, thus enhancing knowledge extraction from these historical resources.

One of the main tasks of Natural Language Processing (NLP), is Named Entity Recognition (NER). It is used in many applications and also can be used as an intermediate step for other tasks. We present ANER, a web-based named entity recognizer for the Arabic, and Arabizi languages. The model is built upon BERT, which is a transformer-based encoder. It can recognize 50 different entity classes, covering various fields. We trained our model on the WikiFANE\_Gold dataset which consists of Wikipedia articles. We achieved an F1 score of 88.7\%, which beats CAMeL Tools' F1 score of 83\% on the ANERcorp dataset, which has only 4 classes. We also got an F1 score of 77.7\% on the NewsFANE\_Gold dataset which contains out-of-domain data from News articles. The system is deployed on a user-friendly web interface that accepts users' inputs in Arabic, or Arabizi. It allows users to explore the entities in the text by highlighting them. It can also direct users to get information about entities through Wikipedia directly. We added the ability to do NER using our model, or CAMeL Tools' model through our website. ANER is publicly accessible at http://www.aner.online. We also deployed our model on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/boda/ANER, to allow developers to test and use it.

We introduce MyVoice, a crowdsourcing platform designed to collect Arabic speech to enhance dialectal speech technologies. This platform offers an opportunity to design large dialectal speech datasets; and makes them publicly available. MyVoice allows contributors to select city/country-level fine-grained dialect and record the displayed utterances. Users can switch roles between contributors and annotators. The platform incorporates a quality assurance system that filters out low-quality and spurious recordings before sending them for validation. During the validation phase, contributors can assess the quality of recordings, annotate them, and provide feedback which is then reviewed by administrators. Furthermore, the platform offers flexibility to admin roles to add new data or tasks beyond dialectal speech and word collection, which are displayed to contributors. Thus, enabling collaborative efforts in gathering diverse and large Arabic speech data.

With large Foundation Models (FMs), language technologies (AI in general) are entering a new paradigm: eliminating the need for developing large-scale task-specific datasets and supporting a variety of tasks through set-ups ranging from zero-shot to few-shot learning. However, understanding FMs capabilities requires a systematic benchmarking effort by comparing FMs performance with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) task-specific models. With that goal, past work focused on the English language and included a few efforts with multiple languages. Our study contributes to ongoing research by evaluating FMs performance for standard Arabic NLP and Speech processing, including a range of tasks from sequence tagging to content classification across diverse domains. We start with zero-shot learning using GPT-3.5-turbo, Whisper, and USM, addressing 33 unique tasks using 59 publicly available datasets resulting in 96 test setups. For a few tasks, FMs performs on par or exceeds the performance of the SOTA models but for the majority it under-performs. Given the importance of prompt for the FMs performance, we discuss our prompt strategies in detail and elaborate on our findings. Our future work on Arabic AI will explore few-shot prompting, expand the range of tasks, and investigate additional open-source models.

This paper introduces a novel Arabic pronunciation learning application QVoice, powered with end-to-end mispronunciation detection and feedback generator module. The application is designed to support non-native Arabic speakers in enhancing their pronunciation skills, while also helping native speakers mitigate any potential influence from regional dialects on their Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) pronunciation. QVoice employs various learning cues to aid learners in comprehending meaning, drawing connections with their existing knowledge of English language, and offers detailed feedback for pronunciation correction, along with contextual examples showcasing word usage. The learning cues featured in QVoice encompass a wide range of meaningful information, such as visualizations of phrases/words and their translations, as well as phonetic transcriptions and transliterations. QVoice provides pronunciation feedback at the character level and assesses performance at the word level.

This paper introduces the RGB Arabic Alphabet Sign Language (AASL) dataset. AASL comprises 7,856 raw and fully labelled RGB images of the Arabic sign language alphabets, which to our best knowledge is the first publicly available RGB dataset. The dataset is aimed to help those interested in developing real-life Arabic sign language classification models. AASL was collected from more than 200 participants and with different settings such as lighting, background, image orientation, image size, and image resolution. Experts in the field supervised, validated and filtered the collected images to ensure a high-quality dataset. AASL is made available to the public on Kaggle.

Deaf people are using sign language for communication, and it is a combination of gestures, movements, postures, and facial expressions that correspond to alphabets and words in spoken languages. The proposed Arabic sign language recognition model helps deaf and hard hearing people communicate effectively with ordinary people. The recognition has four stages of converting the alphabet into letters as follows: Image Loading stage, which loads the images of Arabic sign language alphabets that were used later to train and test the model, a pre-processing stage which applies image processing techniques such as normalization, Image augmentation, resizing, and filtering to extract the features which are necessary to accomplish the recognition perfectly, a training stage which is achieved by deep learning techniques like CNN, a testing stage which demonstrates how effectively the model performs for images did not see it before, and the model was built and tested mainly using PyTorch library. The model is tested on ArASL2018, consisting of 54,000 images for 32 alphabet signs gathered from 40 signers, and the dataset has two sets: training dataset and testing dataset. We had to ensure that the system is reliable in terms of accuracy, time, and flexibility of use explained in detail in this report. Finally, the future work will be a model that converts Arabic sign language into Arabic text.

Scholarship on generative pretraining (GPT) remains acutely Anglocentric, leaving serious gaps in our understanding of the whole class of autoregressive models. For example, we have little knowledge about the potential of these models and their societal impacts in diverse linguistic and cultural settings. We alleviate this issue for Arabic, a wide collection of languages and dialectal varieties with more than 400 million population, by introducing JASMINE. JASMINE is a suite of powerful Arabic autoregressive Transformer language models ranging in size between 300 million-6.7 billion parameters pretrained on a large and diverse dataset (~ 235 GB of text). We also carefully design and release a comprehensive benchmark for both automated and human evaluation of Arabic autoregressive models, with coverage of potential social biases, harms, and toxicity. Using our novel benchmark, we evaluate JASMINE extensively showing powerful performance intrinsically as well as in few-shot learning on a wide range of NLP tasks. We aim to responsibly release our models and evaluation benchmark with interested researchers, along with code for experimenting with them.

This paper presents an attempt to build a Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) sentence-level simplification system. We experimented with sentence simplification using two approaches: (i) a classification approach leading to lexical simplification pipelines which use Arabic-BERT, a pre-trained contextualised model, as well as a model of fastText word embeddings; and (ii) a generative approach, a Seq2Seq technique by applying a multilingual Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer mT5. We developed our training corpus by aligning the original and simplified sentences from the internationally acclaimed Arabic novel "Saaq al-Bambuu". We evaluate effectiveness of these methods by comparing the generated simple sentences to the target simple sentences using the BERTScore evaluation metric. The simple sentences produced by the mT5 model achieve P 0.72, R 0.68 and F-1 0.70 via BERTScore, while, combining Arabic-BERT and fastText achieves P 0.97, R 0.97 and F-1 0.97. In addition, we report a manual error analysis for these experiments. https://github.com/Nouran-Khallaf/Lexical_Simplification

The largest dataset of Arabic speech mispronunciation detections in Egyptian dialogues is introduced. The dataset is composed of annotated audio files representing the top 100 words that are most frequently used in the Arabic language, pronounced by 100 Egyptian children (aged between 2 and 8 years old). The dataset is collected and annotated on segmental pronunciation error detections by expert listeners.

The 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19), emerged late December 2019 in China, is now rapidly spreading across the globe. At the time of writing this paper, the number of global confirmed cases has passed two millions and half with over 180,000 fatalities. Many countries have enforced strict social distancing policies to contain the spread of the virus. This have changed the daily life of tens of millions of people, and urged people to turn their discussions online, e.g., via online social media sites like Twitter. In this work, we describe the first Arabic tweets dataset on COVID-19 that we have been collecting since January 1st, 2020. The dataset would help researchers and policy makers in studying different societal issues related to the pandemic. Many other tasks related to behavioral change, information sharing, misinformation and rumors spreading can also be analyzed.

In this work, we present several deep learning models for the automatic diacritization of Arabic text. Our models are built using two main approaches, viz. Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), with several enhancements such as 100-hot encoding, embeddings, Conditional Random Field (CRF) and Block-Normalized Gradient (BNG). The models are tested on the only freely available benchmark dataset and the results show that our models are either better or on par with other models, which require language-dependent post-processing steps, unlike ours. Moreover, we show that diacritics in Arabic can be used to enhance the models of NLP tasks such as Machine Translation (MT) by proposing the Translation over Diacritization (ToD) approach.

In this paper, we make freely accessible ANETAC our English-Arabic named entity transliteration and classification dataset that we built from freely available parallel translation corpora. The dataset contains 79,924 instances, each instance is a triplet (e, a, c), where e is the English named entity, a is its Arabic transliteration and c is its class that can be either a Person, a Location, or an Organization. The ANETAC dataset is mainly aimed for the researchers that are working on Arabic named entity transliteration, but it can also be used for named entity classification purposes.

This paper describes the Arabic MGB-3 Challenge - Arabic Speech Recognition in the Wild. Unlike last year's Arabic MGB-2 Challenge, for which the recognition task was based on more than 1,200 hours broadcast TV news recordings from Aljazeera Arabic TV programs, MGB-3 emphasises dialectal Arabic using a multi-genre collection of Egyptian YouTube videos. Seven genres were used for the data collection: comedy, cooking, family/kids, fashion, drama, sports, and science (TEDx). A total of 16 hours of videos, split evenly across the different genres, were divided into adaptation, development and evaluation data sets. The Arabic MGB-Challenge comprised two tasks: A) Speech transcription, evaluated on the MGB-3 test set, along with the 10 hour MGB-2 test set to report progress on the MGB-2 evaluation; B) Arabic dialect identification, introduced this year in order to distinguish between four major Arabic dialects - Egyptian, Levantine, North African, Gulf, as well as Modern Standard Arabic. Two hours of audio per dialect were released for development and a further two hours were used for evaluation. For dialect identification, both lexical features and i-vector bottleneck features were shared with participants in addition to the raw audio recordings. Overall, thirteen teams submitted ten systems to the challenge. We outline the approaches adopted in each system, and summarise the evaluation results.

This paper details our submission to the Ara- GenEval Shared Task on Arabic AI-generated text detection, where our team, BUSTED, se- cured 5th place. We investigated the effec- tiveness of three pre-trained transformer mod- els: AraELECTRA, CAMeLBERT, and XLM- RoBERTa. Our approach involved fine-tuning each model on the provided dataset for a binary classification task. Our findings revealed a sur- prising result: the multilingual XLM-RoBERTa model achieved the highest performance with an F1 score of 0.7701, outperforming the spe- cialized Arabic models. This work underscores the complexities of AI-generated text detection and highlights the strong generalization capa- bilities of multilingual models.

On social media, Arabic people tend to express themselves in their own local dialects. More particularly, Tunisians use the informal way called "Tunisian Arabizi". Analytical studies seek to explore and recognize online opinions aiming to exploit them for planning and prediction purposes such as measuring the customer satisfaction and establishing sales and marketing strategies. However, analytical studies based on Deep Learning are data hungry. On the other hand, African languages and dialects are considered low resource languages. For instance, to the best of our knowledge, no annotated Tunisian Arabizi dataset exists. In this paper, we introduce TUNIZI a sentiment analysis Tunisian Arabizi Dataset, collected from social networks, preprocessed for analytical studies and annotated manually by Tunisian native speakers.

In this paper, we present ArCOV-19, an Arabic COVID-19 Twitter dataset that spans one year, covering the period from 27th of January 2020 till 31st of January 2021. ArCOV-19 is the first publicly-available Arabic Twitter dataset covering COVID-19 pandemic that includes about 2.7M tweets alongside the propagation networks of the most-popular subset of them (i.e., most-retweeted and -liked). The propagation networks include both retweets and conversational threads (i.e., threads of replies). ArCOV-19 is designed to enable research under several domains including natural language processing, information retrieval, and social computing. Preliminary analysis shows that ArCOV-19 captures rising discussions associated with the first reported cases of the disease as they appeared in the Arab world. In addition to the source tweets and propagation networks, we also release the search queries and language-independent crawler used to collect the tweets to encourage the curation of similar datasets.

This study is an attempt to build a contemporary linguistic corpus for Arabic language. The corpus produced, is a text corpus includes more than five million newspaper articles. It contains over a billion and a half words in total, out of which, there is about three million unique words. The data were collected from newspaper articles in ten major news sources from eight Arabic countries, over a period of fourteen years. The corpus was encoded with two types of encoding, namely: UTF-8, and Windows CP-1256. Also it was marked with two mark-up languages, namely: SGML, and XML.