ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Shared Task on Gender Rewriting (2022)

In this paper, we present the results and findings of the Shared Task on Gender Rewriting, which was organized as part of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop. The task of gender rewriting refers to generating alternatives of a given sentence to match different target user gender contexts (e.g., a female speaker with a male listener, a male speaker with a male listener, etc.). This requires changing the grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) of certain words referring to the users. In this task, we focus on Arabic, a gender-marking morphologically rich language. A total of five teams from four countries participated in the shared task.
Overview of the WANLP 2022 Shared Task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic (2022)

Propaganda is defined as an expression of opinion or action by individuals or groups deliberately designed to influence opinions or actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends and this is achieved by means of well-defined rhetorical and psychological devices. Currently, propaganda (or persuasion) techniques have been commonly used on social media to manipulate or mislead social media users. Automatic detection of propaganda techniques from textual, visual, or multimodal content has been studied recently, however, major of such efforts are focused on English language content. In this paper, we propose a shared task on detecting propaganda techniques for Arabic textual content. We have done a pilot annotation of 200 Arabic tweets, which we plan to extend to 2,000 tweets, covering diverse topics. We hope that the shared task will help in building a community for Arabic propaganda detection. The dataset will be made publicly available, which can help in future studies.
ArzEn-ST: A Three-way Speech Translation Corpus for Code-Switched Egyptian Arabic-English (2022)

We present our work on collecting ArzEn-ST, a code-switched Egyptian Arabic-English Speech Translation Corpus. This corpus is an extension of the ArzEn speech corpus, which was collected through informal interviews with bilingual speakers. In this work, we collect translations in both directions, monolingual Egyptian Arabic and monolingual English, forming a three-way speech translation corpus. We make the translation guidelines and corpus publicly available. We also report results for baseline systems for machine translation and speech translation tasks. We believe this is a valuable resource that can motivate and facilitate further research studying the code-switching phenomenon from a linguistic perspective and can be used to train and evaluate NLP systems.
Maknuune: A Large Open Palestinian Arabic Lexicon (2022)

We present Maknuune, a large open lexicon for the Palestinian Arabic dialect. Maknuune has over 36K entries from 17K lemmas, and 3.7K roots. All entries include diacritized Arabic orthography, phonological transcription and English glosses. Some entries are enriched with additional information such as broken plurals and templatic feminine forms, associated phrases and collocations, Standard Arabic glosses, and examples or notes on grammar, usage, or location of collected entry
Developing a Tag-Set and Extracting the Morphological Lexicons to Build a Morphological Analyzer for Egyptian Arabic (2022)

This paper sheds light on an in-progress work for building a morphological analyzer for Egyptian Arabic (EGY). To build such a tool, a tag-set schema is developed depending on a corpus of 527,000 EGY words covering different sources and genres. This tag-set schema is used in annotating about 318,940 words, morphologically, according to their contexts. Each annotated word is associated with its suitable prefix(s), original stem, tag, suffix(s), glossary, number, gender, definiteness, and conventional lemma and stem. These morphologically annotated words, in turns, are used in developing the proposed morphological analyzer where the morphological lexicons and the compatibility tables are extracted and tested. The system is compared with one of best EGY morphological analyzers; CALIMA.
A Weak Supervised Transfer Learning Approach for Sentiment Analysis to the Kuwaiti Dialect (2022)

Developing a system for sentiment analysis is very challenging for the Arabic language due to the limitations in the available Arabic datasets. Many Arabic dialects are still not studied by researchers in Arabic sentiment analysis due to the complexity of annotators' recruitment process during dataset creation. This paper covers the research gap in sentiment analysis for the Kuwaiti dialect by proposing a weak supervised approach to develop a large labeled dataset. Our dataset consists of over 16.6k tweets with 7,905 negatives, 7,902 positives, and 860 neutrals that spans several themes and time frames to remove any bias that might affect its content. The annotation agreement between our proposed system`s labels and human-annotated labels reports 93{\%} for the pairwise percent agreement and 0.87 for Cohen`s kappa coefficient. Furthermore, we evaluate our dataset using multiple traditional machine learning classifiers and advanced deep learning language models to test its performance. The results report 89{\%} accuracy when applied to the testing dataset using the ARBERT model.
Mawqif: A Multi-label Arabic Dataset for Target-specific Stance Detection (2022)

Social media platforms are becoming inherent parts of people`s daily life to express opinions and stances toward topics of varying polarities. Stance detection determines the viewpoint expressed in a text toward a target. While communication on social media (e.g., Twitter) takes place in more than 40 languages, the majority of stance detection research has been focused on English. Although some efforts have recently been made to develop stance detection datasets in other languages, no similar efforts seem to have considered the Arabic language. In this paper, we present Mawqif, the first Arabic dataset for target-specific stance detection, composed of 4,121 tweets annotated with stance, sentiment, and sarcasm polarities. Mawqif, as a multi-label dataset, can provide more opportunities for studying the interaction between different opinion dimensions and evaluating a multi-task model. We provide a detailed description of the dataset, present an analysis of the produced annotation, and evaluate four BERT-based models on it. Our best model achieves a macro-F1 of 78.89{\%}, which shows that there is ample room for improvement on this challenging task. We publicly release our dataset, the annotation guidelines, and the code of the experiments.
Assessing the Linguistic Knowledge in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models Using Minimal Pairs (2022)

Despite the noticeable progress that we recently witnessed in Arabic pre-trained language models (PLMs), the linguistic knowledge captured by these models remains unclear. In this paper, we conducted a study to evaluate available Arabic PLMs in terms of their linguistic knowledge. BERT-based language models (LMs) are evaluated using Minimum Pairs (MP), where each pair represents a grammatical sentence and its contradictory counterpart. MPs isolate specific linguistic knowledge to test the model`s sensitivity in understanding a specific linguistic phenomenon. We cover nine major Arabic phenomena: Verbal sentences, Nominal sentences, Adjective Modification, and Idafa construction. The experiments compared the results of fifteen Arabic BERT-based PLMs. Overall, among all tested models, CAMeL-CA outperformed the other PLMs by achieving the highest overall accuracy.
Identifying Code-switching in Arabizi (2022)

We describe a corpus of social media posts that include utterances in Arabizi, a Roman-script rendering of Arabic, mixed with other languages, notably English, French, and Arabic written in the Arabic script. We manually annotated a subset of the texts with word-level language IDs; this is a non-trivial task due to the nature of mixed-language writing, especially on social media. We developed classifiers that can accurately predict the language ID tags. Then, we extended the word-level predictions to identify sentences that include Arabizi (and code-switching), and applied the classifiers to the raw corpus, thereby harvesting a large number of additional instances. The result is a large-scale dataset of Arabizi, with precise indications of code-switching between Arabizi and English, French, and Arabic.
Authorship Verification for Arabic Short Texts Using Arabic Knowledge-Base Model (AraKB) (2022)

Arabic is a Semitic language, considered to be one of the most complex languages in the world due to its unique composition and complex linguistic features. It consequently causes challenges for verifying the authorship of Arabic texts, requiring extensive research and development. This paper presents a new knowledge-based model to enhance Natural Language Understanding and thereby improve authorship verification performance. The proposed model provided promising results that would benefit the Arabic research for different Natural Language Processing tasks.
A Semi-supervised Approach for a Better Translation of Sentiment in Dialectical Arabic UGT (2022)

In the online world, Machine Translation (MT) systems are extensively used to translate User-Generated Text (UGT) such as reviews, tweets, and social media posts, where the main message is often the author`s positive or negative attitude towards the topic of the text. However, MT systems still lack accuracy in some low-resource languages and sometimes make critical translation errors that completely flip the sentiment polarity of the target word or phrase and hence delivers a wrong affect message. This is particularly noticeable in texts that do not follow common lexico-grammatical standards such as the dialectical Arabic (DA) used on online platforms. In this research, we aim to improve the translation of sentiment in UGT written in the dialectical versions of the Arabic language to English. Given the scarcity of gold-standard parallel data for DA-EN in the UGT domain, we introduce a semi-supervised approach that exploits both monolingual and parallel data for training an NMT system initialised by a cross-lingual language model trained with supervised and unsupervised modeling objectives. We assess the accuracy of sentiment translation by our proposed system through a numerical {\textquoteleft}sentiment-closeness' measure as well as human evaluation. We will show that our semi-supervised MT system can significantly help with correcting sentiment errors detected in the online translation of dialectical Arabic UGT.
Cross-lingual transfer for low-resource Arabic language understanding (2022)

This paper explores cross-lingual transfer learning in natural language understanding (NLU), with the focus on bootstrapping Arabic from high-resource English and French languages for domain classification, intent classification, and named entity recognition tasks. We adopt a BERT-based architecture and pretrain three models using open-source Wikipedia data and large-scale commercial datasets: monolingual:Arabic, bilingual:Arabic-English, and trilingual:Arabic-English-French models. Additionally, we use off-the-shelf machine translator to translate internal data from source English language to the target Arabic language, in an effort to enhance transfer learning through translation. We conduct experiments that finetune the three models for NLU tasks and evaluate them on a large internal dataset. Despite the morphological, orthographical, and grammatical differences between Arabic and the source languages, transfer learning performance gains from source languages and through machine translation are achieved on a real-world Arabic test dataset in both a zero-shot setting and in a setting when the models are further finetuned on labeled data from the target language.
Improving POS Tagging for Arabic Dialects on Out-of-Domain Texts (2022)

We investigate part of speech tagging for four Arabic dialects (Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, and Maghrebi), in an out-of-domain setting. More specifically, we look at the effectiveness of 1) upsampling the target dialect in the training data of a joint model, 2) increasing the consistency of the annotations, and 3) using word embeddings pre-trained on a large corpus of dialectal Arabic. We increase the accuracy on average by about 20 percentage points.
Domain Adaptation for Arabic Crisis Response (2022)

Deep learning algorithms can identify related tweets to reduce the information overload that prevents humanitarian organisations from using valuable Twitter posts. However, they rely heavily on human-labelled data, which are unavailable for emerging crises. Because each crisis has its own features, such as location, time and social media response, current models are known to suffer from generalising to unseen disaster events when pre-trained on past ones. Tweet classifiers for low-resource languages like Arabic has the additional issue of limited labelled data duplicates caused by the absence of good language resources. Thus, we propose a novel domain adaptation approach that employs distant supervision to automatically label tweets from emerging Arabic crisis events to be used to train a model along with available human-labelled data. We evaluate our work on data from seven 2018{--}2020 Arabic events from different crisis types (flood, explosion, virus and storm). Results show that our method outperforms self-training in identifying crisis-related tweets in real-time scenarios and can be seen as a robust Arabic tweet classifier.
Weakly and Semi-Supervised Learning for Arabic Text Classification using Monodialectal Language Models (2022)

The lack of resources such as annotated datasets and tools for low-resource languages is a significant obstacle to the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications targeting users who speak these languages. Although learning techniques such as semi-supervised and weakly supervised learning are effective in text classification cases where annotated data is limited, they are still not widely investigated in many languages due to the sparsity of data altogether, both labeled and unlabeled. In this study, we deploy both weakly, and semi-supervised learning approaches for text classification in low-resource languages and address the underlying limitations that can hinder the effectiveness of these techniques. To that end, we propose a suite of language-agnostic techniques for large-scale data collection, automatic data annotation, and language model training in scenarios where resources are scarce. Specifically, we propose a novel data collection pipeline for under-represented languages, or dialects, that is language and task agnostic and of sufficient size for training a language model capable of achieving competitive results on common NLP tasks, as our experiments show. The models will be shared with the research community.
Event-Based Knowledge MLM for Arabic Event Detection (2022)

With the fast pace of reporting around the globe from various sources, event extraction has increasingly become an important task in NLP. The use of pre-trained language models (PTMs) has become popular to provide contextual representation for downstream tasks. This work aims to pre-train language models that enhance event extraction accuracy. To this end, we propose an Event-Based Knowledge (EBK) masking approach to mask the most significant terms in the event detection task. These significant terms are based on an external knowledge source that is curated for the purpose of event detection for the Arabic language. The proposed approach improves the classification accuracy of all the 9 event types. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed masking approach and encourage further exploration.
Establishing a Baseline for Arabic Patents Classification: A Comparison of Twelve Approaches (2022)

Nowadays, the number of patent applications is constantly growing and there is an economical interest on developing accurate and fast models to automate their classification task. In this paper, we introduce the first public Arabic patent dataset called ArPatent and experiment with twelve classification approaches to develop a baseline for Arabic patents classification. To achieve the goal of finding the best baseline for classifying Arabic patents, different machine learning, pre-trained language models as well as ensemble approaches were conducted. From the obtained results, we can observe that the best performing model for classifying Arabic patents was ARBERT with F1 of 66.53{\%}, while the ensemble approach of the best three performing language models, namely: ARBERT, CAMeL-MSA, and QARiB, achieved the second best F1 score, i.e., 64.52{\%}.
Towards Learning Arabic Morphophonology (2022)

One core challenge facing morphological inflection systems is capturing language-specific morphophonological changes. This is particularly true of languages like Arabic which are morphologically complex. In this paper, we learn explicit morphophonological rules from morphologically annotated Egyptian Arabic and corresponding surface forms. These rules are human-interpretable, capture known morphophonological phenomena in the language, and are generalizable to unseen forms.
AraDepSu: Detecting Depression and Suicidal Ideation in Arabic Tweets Using Transformers (2022)

Among mental health diseases, depression is one of the most severe, as it often leads to suicide which is the fourth leading cause of death in the Middle East. In the Middle East, Egypt has the highest percentage of suicidal deaths; due to this, it is important to identify depression and suicidal ideation. In Arabic culture, there is a lack of awareness regarding the importance of diagnosing and living with mental health diseases. However, as noted for the last couple years people all over the world, including Arab citizens, tend to express their feelings openly on social media. Twitter is the most popular platform designed to enable the expression of emotions through short texts, pictures, or videos. This paper aims to predict depression and depression with suicidal ideation. Due to the tendency of people to treat social media as their personal diaries and share their deepest thoughts on social media platforms. Social data contain valuable information that can be used to identify user`s psychological states. We create AraDepSu dataset by scrapping tweets from twitter and manually labelling them. We expand the diversity of user tweets, by adding a neutral label ({\textquotedblleft}neutral{\textquotedblright}) so the dataset include three classes ({\textquotedblleft}depressed{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}suicidal{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}neutral{\textquotedblright}). Then we train our AraDepSu dataset on 30+ different transformer models. We find that the best-performing model is MARBERT with accuracy, precision, recall and F1-Score values of 91.20{\%}, 88.74{\%}, 88.50{\%} and 88.75{\%}.
End-to-End Speech Translation of Arabic to English Broadcast News (2022)

Speech translation (ST) is the task of directly translating acoustic speech signals in a source language into text in a foreign language. ST task has been addressed, for a long time, using a pipeline approach with two modules : first an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the source language followed by a text-to-text Machine translation (MT). In the past few years, we have seen a paradigm shift towards the end-to-end approaches using sequence-to-sequence deep neural network models. This paper presents our efforts towards the development of the first Broadcast News end-to-end Arabic to English speech translation system. Starting from independent ASR and MT LDC releases, we were able to identify about 92 hours of Arabic audio recordings for which the manual transcription was also translated into English at the segment level. These data was used to train and compare pipeline and end-to-end speech translation systems under multiple scenarios including transfer learning and data augmentation techniques.
Arabic Keyphrase Extraction: Enhancing Deep Learning Models with Pre-trained Contextual Embedding and External Features (2022)

Keyphrase extraction is essential to many Information retrieval (IR) and Natural language Processing (NLP) tasks such as summarization and indexing. This study investigates deep learning approaches to Arabic keyphrase extraction. We address the problem as sequence classification and create a Bi-LSTM model to classify each sequence token as either part of the keyphrase or outside of it. We have extracted word embeddings from two pre-trained models, Word2Vec and BERT. Moreover, we have investigated the effect of incorporating linguistic, positional, and statistical features with word embeddings on performance. Our best-performing model has achieved 0.45 F1-score on ArabicKPE dataset when combining linguistic and positional features with BERT embedding.
ArabIE: Joint Entity, Relation and Event Extraction for Arabic (2022)

Previous work on Arabic information extraction has mainly focused on named entity recognition and very little work has been done on Arabic relation extraction and event recognition. Moreover, modeling Arabic data for such tasks is not straightforward because of the morphological richness and idiosyncrasies of the Arabic language. We propose in this article the first neural joint information extraction system for the Arabic language.
Emoji Sentiment Roles for Sentiment Analysis: A Case Study in Arabic Texts (2022)

Emoji (digital pictograms) are crucial features for textual sentiment analysis. However, analysing the sentiment roles of emoji is very complex. This is due to its dependency on different factors, such as textual context, cultural perspective, interlocutor`s personal traits, interlocutors' relationships or a platforms' functional features. This work introduces an approach to analysing the sentiment effects of emoji as textual features. Using an Arabic dataset as a benchmark, our results confirm the borrowed argument that each emoji has three different norms of sentiment role (negative, neutral or positive). Therefore, an emoji can play different sentiment roles depending upon the context. It can behave as an emphasizer, an indicator, a mitigator, a reverser or a trigger of either negative or positive sentiment within a text. In addition, an emoji may have a neutral effect (i.e., no effect) on the sentiment of the text.
Gulf Arabic Diacritization: Guidelines, Initial Dataset, and Results (2022)

Arabic diacritic recovery is important for a variety of downstream tasks such as text-to-speech. In this paper, we introduce a new Gulf Arabic diacritization dataset composed of 19,850 words based on a subset of the Gumar corpus. We provide comprehensive set of guidelines for diacritization to enable the diacritization of more data. We also report on diacritization results based on the new corpus using a Hidden Markov Model and character-based sequence to sequence models.