ATHAR: A High-Quality and Diverse Dataset for Classical Arabic to
  English Translation
Authors: name: Mohammed Khalil; name: Mohammed Sabry
Published: 2024-07-29 09:45:34

Abstract: 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.