GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Qalam: A Multimodal LLM for Arabic Optical Character and Handwriting Recognition
Authors: Gagan Bhatia; El Moatez Billah Nagoudi; Fakhraddin Alwajih; Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: 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.
ArabLegalEval: A Multitask Benchmark for Assessing Arabic Legal Knowledge in Large Language Models
Authors: Faris Hijazi; Somayah AlHarbi; Abdulaziz AlHussein; Harethah Abu Shairah; Reem AlZahrani; Hebah AlShamlan; Omar Knio; George Turkiyyah
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: 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
CATT: Character-based Arabic Tashkeel Transformer
Authors: Faris Alasmary; Orjuwan Zaafarani; Ahmad Ghannam
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: Tashkeel, or Arabic Text Diacritization (ATD), greatly enhances the comprehension of Arabic text by removing ambiguity and minimizing the risk of misinterpretations caused by its absence.It plays a crucial role in improving Arabic text processing, particularly in applications such as text-to-speech and machine translation.This paper introduces a new approach to training ATD models.First, we finetuned two transformers, encoder-only and encoder-decoder, that were initialized from a pretrained character-based BERT.Then, we applied the Noisy-Student approach to boost the performance of the best model.We evaluated our models alongside 11 commercial and open-source models using two manually labeled benchmark datasets: WikiNews and our CATT dataset.Our findings show that our top model surpasses all evaluated models by relative Diacritic Error Rates (DERs) of 30.83% and 35.21% on WikiNews and CATT, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art in ATD.In addition, we show that our model outperforms GPT-4-turbo on CATT dataset by a relative DER of 9.36%.We open-source our CATT models and benchmark dataset for the research community .
Picking Up Where the Linguist Left Off: Mapping Morphology to Phonology through Learning the Residuals
Authors: Salam Khalifa; Abdelrahim Qaddoumi; Ellen Broselow; Owen Rambow
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: Learning morphophonological mappings between the spoken form of a language and its underlying morphological structures is crucial for enriching resources for morphologically rich languages like Arabic. In this work, we focus on Egyptian Arabic as our case study and explore the integration of linguistic knowledge with a neural transformer model. Our approach involves learning to correct the residual errors from hand-crafted rules to predict the spoken form from a given underlying morphological representation. We demonstrate that using a minimal set of rules, we can effectively recover errors even in very low-resource settings.
On the Utility of Pretraining Language Models on Synthetic Data
Authors: Alcides Alcoba Inciarte; Sang Yun Kwon; El Moatez Billah Nagoudi; Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: Development of pre-trained language models has predominantly relied on large amounts of datasets. However, this dependence on abundant data has limited the applicability of these models in low-resource settings. In this work, we investigate the utility of exploiting synthetic datasets acquired from different sources to pre-train language models for Arabic. Namely, we leverage data derived based on four different methods: optical character recognition (OCR), automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT), and generative language models. We use these datasets to pre-train models in three different architectures: encoder-only (BERTBase), encoder-decoder (T5), and decoder-only (GPT-2). We test the capabilities of resulting models on Arabic natural language understanding (NLU) tasks using the ORCA benchmark. Our results show that utilizing synthetic data can achieve performance comparable to, or even surpassing, those trained on gold data. For example, our model based on a GPT-2 architecture trained on a combined synthetic dataset surpasses the baseline model ARBERTv2. Overall, our models pre-trained on synthetic data demonstrate robust performance across various tasks. This highlights the potential of synthetic datasets in augmenting language model training in low-resource settings.
Benchmarking LLaMA-3 on Arabic Language Generation Tasks
Authors: Md Tawkat Islam Khondaker; Numaan Naeem; Fatimah Khan; AbdelRahim Elmadany; Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: Open-sourced large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance in a variety of NLP tasks, often catching up with the closed-sourced LLMs like ChatGPT. Among these open LLMs, LLaMA-3-70B has emerged as the most recent and the most prominent one. However, how LLaMA-3-70B would situate itself in multilingual settings, especially in a rich morphological language like Arabic, has yet to be explored. In this work, we focus to bridge this gap by evaluating LLaMA-3-70B on a diverse set of Arabic natural language generation (NLG) benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that comprehensively evaluates LLaMA-3-70B on tasks related to Arabic natural language generation. Our study reveals that LLaMA-3-70B lags behind the closed LLMs like ChatGPT, both in modern standard Arabic (MSA) and dialectal Arabic (DA). We further compare the performance of LLaMA-3-70B with our smaller and dedicated finetuned Arabic models. We find that both LLaMA-3-70B and ChatGPT are outperformed by comparatively smaller dedicated Arabic models, indicating the scope for potential improvement with Arabic-focused LLMs.
From Nile Sands to Digital Hands: Machine Translation of Coptic Texts
Authors: Muhammed Saeed; Asim Mohamed; Mukhtar Mohamed; Shady Shehata; Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: The Coptic language, rooted in the historical landscapes of Egypt, continues to serve as a vital liturgical medium for the Coptic Orthodox and Catholic Churches across Egypt, North Sudan, Libya, and the United States, with approximately ten million speakers worldwide. However, the scarcity of digital resources in Coptic has resulted in its exclusion from digital systems, thereby limiting its accessibility and preservation in modern technological contexts. Our research addresses this issue by developing the most extensive parallel Coptic-centered corpus to date. This corpus comprises over 8,000 parallel sentences between Arabic and Coptic, and more than 24,000 parallel sentences between English and Coptic. We have also developed the first neural machine translation system between Coptic, English, and Arabic. Lastly, we evaluate the capability of leading proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate to and from Coptic using a few-shot learning approach (in-context learning). Our code and data are available at https://github.com/UBC-NLP/copticmt.
Event-Arguments Extraction Corpus and Modeling using BERT for Arabic
Authors: Alaa Aljabari; Lina Duaibes; Mustafa Jarrar; Mohammed Khalilia
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: Event-argument extraction is a challenging task, particularly in Arabic due to sparse linguistic resources. To fill this gap, we introduce the corpus (550k tokens) as an extension of Wojood, enriched with event-argument annotations. We used three types of event arguments: agent, location, and date, which we annotated as relation types. Our inter-annotator agreement evaluation resulted in 82.23% Kappa score and 87.2% F1-score. Additionally, we propose a novel method for event relation extraction using BERT, in which we treat the task as text entailment. This method achieves an F1-score of 94.01%.To further evaluate the generalization of our proposed method, we collected and annotated another out-of-domain corpus (about 80k tokens) called and used it as a second test set, on which our approach achieved promising results (83.59% F1-score). Last but not least, we propose an end-to-end system for event-arguments extraction. This system is implemented as part of SinaTools, and both corpora are publicly available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/wojood
Dallah: A Dialect-Aware Multimodal Large Language Model for Arabic
Authors: Fakhraddin Alwajih; Gagan Bhatia; Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: 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.
QAES: First Publicly-Available Trait-Specific Annotations for Automated Scoring of Arabic Essays
Authors: May Bashendy; Salam Albatarni; Sohaila Eltanbouly; Eman Zahran; Hamdo Elhuseyin; Tamer Elsayed; Walid Massoud; Houda Bouamor
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has emerged as a significant research problem within natural language processing, providing valuable support for educators in assessing student writing skills. In this paper, we introduce QAES, the first publicly available trait-specific annotations for Arabic AES, built on the Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing (QCAW). QAES includes a diverse collection of essays in Arabic, each of them annotated with holistic and trait-specific scores, including relevance, organization, vocabulary, style, development, mechanics, and grammar. In total, it comprises 195 Arabic essays (with lengths ranging from 239 to 806 words) across two distinct argumentative writing tasks. We benchmark our dataset against the state-of-the-art English baselines and a feature-based approach. In addition, we discuss the adopted guidelines and the challenges encountered during the annotation process. Finally, we provide insights into potential areas for improvement and future directions in Arabic AES research.
Functional Text Dimensions for Arabic Text Classification
Authors: Zeyd Ferhat; Abir Betka; Riyadh Barka; Zineddine Kahhoul; Selma Boutiba; Mohamed Tiar; Habiba Dahmani; Ahmed Abdelali
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: Text classification is of paramount importance in a wide range of applications, including information retrieval, extraction and sentiment analysis. The challenge of classifying and labelling text genres, especially in web-based corpora, has received considerable attention. The frequent absence of unambiguous genre information complicates the identification of text types. To address these issues, the Functional Text Dimensions (FTD) method has been introduced to provide a universal set of categories for text classification. This study presents the Arabic Functional Text Dimensions Corpus (AFTD Corpus), a carefully curated collection of documents for evaluating text classification in Arabic. The AFTD Corpus which we are making available to the community, consists of 3400 documents spanning 17 different class categories. Through a comprehensive evaluation using traditional machine learning and neural models, we assess the effectiveness of the FTD approach in the Arabic context. CAMeLBERT, a state-of-the-art model, achieved an impressive F1 score of 0.81 on our corpus. This research highlights the potential of the FTD method for improving text classification, especially for Arabic content, and underlines the importance of robust classification models in web applications.
ArabicNLU 2024: The First Arabic Natural Language Understanding Shared Task
Authors: Mohammed Khalilia; Sanad Malaysha; Reem Suwaileh; Mustafa Jarrar; Alaa Aljabari; Tamer Elsayed; Imed Zitouni
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the Arabic Natural Language Understanding (ArabicNLU 2024) shared task, focusing on two subtasks: Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and Location Mention Disambiguation (LMD). The task aimed to evaluate the ability of automated systems to resolve word ambiguity and identify locations mentioned in Arabic text. We provided participants with novel datasets, including a sense-annotated corpus for WSD, called SALMA with approximately 34k annotated tokens, and the dataset with 3,893 annotations and 763 unique location mentions. These are challenging tasks. Out of the 38 registered teams, only three teams participated in the final evaluation phase, with the highest accuracy being 77.8% for WSD and 95.0% for LMD. The shared task not only facilitated the evaluation and comparison of different techniques, but also provided valuable insights and resources for the continued advancement of Arabic NLU technologies.
Pirates at ArabicNLU2024: Enhancing Arabic Word Sense Disambiguation using Transformer-Based Approaches
Authors: Tasneem Wael; Eman Elrefai; Mohamed Makram; Sahar Selim; Ghada Khoriba
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to Ara-bic Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) lever-aging transformer-based models to tackle thecomplexities of the Arabic language. Utiliz-ing the SALMA dataset, we applied severaltechniques, including Sentence Transformerswith Siamese networks and the SetFit frame-work optimized for few-shot learning. Our ex-periments, structured around a robust evalua-tion framework, achieved a promising F1-scoreof up to 71%, securing second place in theArabicNLU 2024: The First Arabic NaturalLanguage Understanding Shared Task compe-tition. These results demonstrate the efficacyof our approach, especially in dealing with thechallenges posed by homophones, homographs,and the lack of diacritics in Arabic texts. Theproposed methods significantly outperformedtraditional WSD techniques, highlighting theirpotential to enhance the accuracy of Arabicnatural language processing applications.
Upaya at ArabicNLU Shared-Task: Arabic Lexical Disambiguation using Large Language Models
Authors: Pawan Rajpoot; Ashvini Jindal; Ankur Parikh
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: Disambiguating a word’s intended meaning(sense) in a given context is important in Nat-ural Language Understanding (NLU). WSDaims to determine the correct sense of ambigu-ous words in context. At the same time, LMD(a WSD variation) focuses on disambiguatinglocation mention. Both tasks are vital in Nat-ural Language Processing (NLP) and informa-tion retrieval, as they help correctly interpretand extract information from text. Arabic ver-sion is further challenging because of its mor-phological richness, encompassing a complexinterplay of roots, stems, and affixes. This pa-per describes our solutions to both tasks, em-ploying Llama3 and Cohere-based models un-der Zero-Shot Learning and Re-Ranking, re-spectively. Both the shared tasks were partof the second Arabic Natural Language Pro-cessing Conference co-located with ACL 2024.Overall, we achieved 1st rank in the WSD task(accuracy 78%) and 2nd rank in the LMD task(MRR@1 0.59)
rematchka at ArabicNLU2024: Evaluating Large Language Models for Arabic Word Sense and Location Sense Disambiguation
Authors: Reem Abdel-Salam
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: Natural Language Understanding (NLU) plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by facilitating semantic interactions. Arabic, with its diverse morphology, poses a challenge as it allows multiple interpretations of words, leading to potential misunderstandings and errors in NLP applications. In this paper, we present our approach for tackling Arabic NLU shared tasks for word sense disambiguation (WSD) and location mention disambiguation (LMD). Various approaches have been investigated from zero-shot inference of large language models (LLMs) to fine-tuning of pre-trained language models (PLMs). The best approach achieved 57% on WSD task ranking third place, while for the LMD task, our best systems achieved 94% MRR@1 ranking first place.
AraFinNLP 2024: The First Arabic Financial NLP Shared Task
Authors: Sanad Malaysha; Mo El-Haj; Saad Ezzini; Mohammed Khalilia; Mustafa Jarrar; Sultan Almujaiwel; Ismail Berrada; Houda Bouamor
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: The expanding financial markets of the Arab world require sophisticated Arabic NLP tools. To address this need within the banking domain, the Arabic Financial NLP (AraFinNLP) shared task proposes two subtasks: (i) Multi-dialect Intent Detection and (ii) Cross-dialect Translation and Intent Preservation. This shared task uses the updated ArBanking77 dataset, which includes about 39k parallel queries in MSA and four dialects. Each query is labeled with one or more of a common 77 intents in the banking domain. These resources aim to foster the development of robust financial Arabic NLP, particularly in the areas of machine translation and banking chat-bots.A total of 45 unique teams registered for this shared task, with 11 of them actively participated in the test phase. Specifically, 11 teams participated in Subtask 1, while only 1 team participated in Subtask 2. The winning team of Subtask 1 achieved F1 score of 0.8773, and the only team submitted in Subtask 2 achieved a 1.667 BLEU score.
SMASH at AraFinNLP2024: Benchmarking Arabic BERT Models on the Intent Detection
Authors: Youssef Al Hariri; Ibrahim Abu Farha
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: The recent growth in Middle Eastern stock markets has intensified the demand for specialized financial Arabic NLP models to serve this sector. This article presents the participation of Team SMASH of The University of Edinburgh in the Multi-dialect Intent Detection task (Subtask 1) of the Arabic Financial NLP (AraFinNLP) Shared Task 2024. The dataset used in the shared task is the ArBanking77 (Jarrar et al., 2023). We tackled this task as a classification problem and utilized several BERT and BART-based models to classify the queries efficiently. Our solution is based on implementing a two-step hierarchical classification model based on MARBERTv2. We fine-tuned the model by using the original queries. Our team, SMASH, was ranked 9th with a macro F1 score of 0.7866, indicating areas for further refinement and potential enhancement of the model’s performance.
Fired_from_NLP at AraFinNLP 2024: Dual-Phase-BERT - A Fine-Tuned Transformer-Based Model for Multi-Dialect Intent Detection in The Financial Domain for The Arabic Language
Authors: Md. Sajid Alam Chowdhury; Mostak Mahmud Chowdhury; Anik Mahmud Shanto; Hasan Murad; Udoy Das
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference)

Abstract: In the financial industry, identifying user intent from text inputs is crucial for various tasks such as automated trading, sentiment analysis, and customer support. One important component of natural language processing (NLP) is intent detection, which is significant to the finance sector. Limited studies have been conducted in the field of finance using languages with limited resources like Arabic, despite notable works being done in high-resource languages like English. To advance Arabic NLP in the financial domain, the organizer of AraFinNLP 2024 has arranged a shared task for detecting banking intents from the queries in various Arabic dialects, introducing a novel dataset named ArBanking77 which includes a collection of banking queries categorized into 77 distinct intents classes. To accomplish this task, we have presented a hierarchical approach called Dual-Phase-BERT in which the detection of dialects is carried out first, followed by the detection of banking intents. Using the provided ArBanking77 dataset, we have trained and evaluated several conventional machine learning, and deep learning models along with some cutting-edge transformer-based models. Among these models, our proposed Dual-Phase-BERT model has ranked 7th out of all competitors, scoring 0.801 on the scale of F1-score on the test set.