Ahmed Abdelali

Fahim Dalvi, Maram Hasanain, Sabri Boughorbel et al.

The recent development and success of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitate an evaluation of their performance across diverse NLP tasks in different languages. Although several frameworks have been developed and made publicly available, their customization capabilities for specific tasks and datasets are often complex for different users. In this study, we introduce the LLMeBench framework, which can be seamlessly customized to evaluate LLMs for any NLP task, regardless of language. The framework features generic dataset loaders, several model providers, and pre-implements most standard evaluation metrics. It supports in-context learning with zero- and few-shot settings. A specific dataset and task can be evaluated for a given LLM in less than 20 lines of code while allowing full flexibility to extend the framework for custom datasets, models, or tasks. The framework has been tested on 31 unique NLP tasks using 53 publicly available datasets within 90 experimental setups, involving approximately 296K data points. We open-sourced LLMeBench for the community (https://github.com/qcri/LLMeBench/) and a video demonstrating the framework is available online. (https://youtu.be/9cC2m_abk3A)

Ahmed Abdelali, Nadir Durrani, Cenk Demiroglu et al.

NatiQ is end-to-end text-to-speech system for Arabic. Our speech synthesizer uses an encoder-decoder architecture with attention. We used both tacotron-based models (tacotron-1 and tacotron-2) and the faster transformer model for generating mel-spectrograms from characters. We concatenated Tacotron1 with the WaveRNN vocoder, Tacotron2 with the WaveGlow vocoder and ESPnet transformer with the parallel wavegan vocoder to synthesize waveforms from the spectrograms. We used in-house speech data for two voices: 1) neutral male "Hamza"- narrating general content and news, and 2) expressive female "Amina"- narrating children story books to train our models. Our best systems achieve an average Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.21 and 4.40 for Amina and Hamza respectively. The objective evaluation of the systems using word and character error rate (WER and CER) as well as the response time measured by real-time factor favored the end-to-end architecture ESPnet. NatiQ demo is available on-line at https://tts.qcri.org

M Saiful Bari, Yazeed Alnumay, Norah A. Alzahrani et al.

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.

Ahmed Abdelali, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi et al.

Arabic is a Semitic language which is widely spoken with many dialects. Given the success of pre-trained language models, many transformer models trained on Arabic and its dialects have surfaced. While there have been an extrinsic evaluation of these models with respect to downstream NLP tasks, no work has been carried out to analyze and compare their internal representations. We probe how linguistic information is encoded in the transformer models, trained on different Arabic dialects. We perform a layer and neuron analysis on the models using morphological tagging tasks for different dialects of Arabic and a dialectal identification task. Our analysis enlightens interesting findings such as: i) word morphology is learned at the lower and middle layers, ii) while syntactic dependencies are predominantly captured at the higher layers, iii) despite a large overlap in their vocabulary, the MSA-based models fail to capture the nuances of Arabic dialects, iv) we found that neurons in embedding layers are polysemous in nature, while the neurons in middle layers are exclusive to specific properties

Basel Mousi, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi et al.

Despite their remarkable ability to capture linguistic nuances across diverse languages, questions persist regarding the degree of alignment between languages in multilingual embeddings. Drawing inspiration from research on high-dimensional representations in neural language models, we employ clustering to uncover latent concepts within multilingual models. Our analysis focuses on quantifying the \textit{alignment} and \textit{overlap} of these concepts across various languages within the latent space. To this end, we introduce two metrics \CA{} and \CO{} aimed at quantifying these aspects, enabling a deeper exploration of multilingual embeddings. Our study encompasses three multilingual models (\texttt{mT5}, \texttt{mBERT}, and \texttt{XLM-R}) and three downstream tasks (Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition, and Sentiment Analysis). Key findings from our analysis include: i) deeper layers in the network demonstrate increased cross-lingual \textit{alignment} due to the presence of language-agnostic concepts, ii) fine-tuning of the models enhances \textit{alignment} within the latent space, and iii) such task-specific calibration helps in explaining the emergence of zero-shot capabilities in the models.\footnote{The code is available at \url{https://github.com/baselmousi/multilingual-latent-concepts}}

Rawan Al-Matham, Kareem Darwish, Raghad Al-Rasheed et al.

The impressive advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in English has not been matched across all languages. In particular, LLM performance in Arabic lags behind, due to data scarcity, linguistic diversity of Arabic and its dialects, morphological complexity, etc. Progress is further hindered by the quality of Arabic benchmarks, which typically rely on static, publicly available data, lack comprehensive task coverage, or do not provide dedicated platforms with blind test sets. This makes it challenging to measure actual progress and to mitigate data contamination. Here, we aim to bridge these gaps. In particular, we introduce BALSAM, a comprehensive, community-driven benchmark aimed at advancing Arabic LLM development and evaluation. It includes 78 NLP tasks from 14 broad categories, with 52K examples divided into 37K test and 15K development, and a centralized, transparent platform for blind evaluation. We envision BALSAM as a unifying platform that sets standards and promotes collaborative research to advance Arabic LLM capabilities.

Abdelhamid Haouhat, Slimane Bellaouar, Attia Nehar et al.

Multimodal Machine Learning (MML) aims to integrate and analyze information from diverse modalities, such as text, audio, and visuals, enabling machines to address complex tasks like sentiment analysis, emotion recognition, and multimedia retrieval. Recently, Arabic MML has reached a certain level of maturity in its foundational development, making it time to conduct a comprehensive survey. This paper explores Arabic MML by categorizing efforts through a novel taxonomy and analyzing existing research. Our taxonomy organizes these efforts into four key topics: datasets, applications, approaches, and challenges. By providing a structured overview, this survey offers insights into the current state of Arabic MML, highlighting areas that have not been investigated and critical research gaps. Researchers will be empowered to build upon the identified opportunities and address challenges to advance the field.

Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak, Shammur Absar Chowdhury et al.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly influenced the landscape of language and speech research. Despite this progress, these models lack specific benchmarking against state-of-the-art (SOTA) models tailored to particular languages and tasks. LAraBench addresses this gap for Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Speech Processing tasks, including sequence tagging and content classification across different domains. We utilized models such as GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, BLOOMZ, Jais-13b-chat, Whisper, and USM, employing zero and few-shot learning techniques to tackle 33 distinct tasks across 61 publicly available datasets. This involved 98 experimental setups, encompassing ~296K data points, ~46 hours of speech, and 30 sentences for Text-to-Speech (TTS). This effort resulted in 330+ sets of experiments. Our analysis focused on measuring the performance gap between SOTA models and LLMs. The overarching trend observed was that SOTA models generally outperformed LLMs in zero-shot learning, with a few exceptions. Notably, larger computational models with few-shot learning techniques managed to reduce these performance gaps. Our findings provide valuable insights into the applicability of LLMs for Arabic NLP and speech processing tasks.

Ahmed Abdelali, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi et al.

Arabic is a Semitic language which is widely spoken with many dialects. Given the success of pre-trained language models, many transformer models trained on Arabic and its dialects have surfaced. While these models have been compared with respect to downstream NLP tasks, no evaluation has been carried out to directly compare the internal representations. We probe how linguistic information is encoded in Arabic pretrained models, trained on different varieties of Arabic language. We perform a layer and neuron analysis on the models using three intrinsic tasks: two morphological tagging tasks based on MSA (modern standard Arabic) and dialectal POS-tagging and a dialectal identification task. Our analysis enlightens interesting findings such as: i) word morphology is learned at the lower and middle layers ii) dialectal identification necessitate more knowledge and hence preserved even in the final layers, iii) despite a large overlap in their vocabulary, the MSA-based models fail to capture the nuances of Arabic dialects, iv) we found that neurons in embedding layers are polysemous in nature, while the neurons in middle layers are exclusive to specific properties.

Amir Hussein, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Ahmed Abdelali et al.

The pervasiveness of intra-utterance code-switching (CS) in spoken content requires that speech recognition (ASR) systems handle mixed language. Designing a CS-ASR system has many challenges, mainly due to data scarcity, grammatical structure complexity, and domain mismatch. The most common method for addressing CS is to train an ASR system with the available transcribed CS speech, along with monolingual data. In this work, we propose a zero-shot learning methodology for CS-ASR by augmenting the monolingual data with artificially generating CS text. We based our approach on random lexical replacements and Equivalence Constraint (EC) while exploiting aligned translation pairs to generate random and grammatically valid CS content. Our empirical results show a 65.5% relative reduction in language model perplexity, and 7.7% in ASR WER on two ecologically valid CS test sets. The human evaluation of the generated text using EC suggests that more than 80% is of adequate quality.

Hamdy Mubarak, Ahmed Abdelali, Kareem Darwish et al.

Rampant use of offensive language on social media led to recent efforts on automatic identification of such language. Though offensive language has general characteristics, attacks on specific entities may exhibit distinct phenomena such as malicious alterations in the spelling of names. In this paper, we present a method for identifying entity specific offensive language. We employ two key insights, namely that replies on Twitter often imply opposition and some accounts are persistent in their offensiveness towards specific targets. Using our methodology, we are able to collect thousands of targeted offensive tweets. We show the efficacy of the approach on Arabic tweets with 13% and 79% relative F1-measure improvement in entity specific offensive language detection when using deep-learning based and support vector machine based classifiers respectively. Further, expanding the training set with automatically identified offensive tweets directed at multiple entities can improve F1-measure by 48%.

Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Amir Hussein, Ahmed Abdelali et al.

With the advent of globalization, there is an increasing demand for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR), handling language and dialectal variation of spoken content. Recent studies show its efficacy over monolingual systems. In this study, we design a large multilingual end-to-end ASR using self-attention based conformer architecture. We trained the system using Arabic (Ar), English (En) and French (Fr) languages. We evaluate the system performance handling: (i) monolingual (Ar, En and Fr); (ii) multi-dialectal (Modern Standard Arabic, along with dialectal variation such as Egyptian and Moroccan); (iii) code-switching -- cross-lingual (Ar-En/Fr) and dialectal (MSA-Egyptian dialect) test cases, and compare with current state-of-the-art systems. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of different embedding/character representations including character vs word-piece; shared vs distinct input symbol per language. Our findings demonstrate the strength of such a model by outperforming state-of-the-art monolingual dialectal Arabic and code-switching Arabic ASR.

Ahmed Abdelali, Sabit Hassan, Hamdy Mubarak et al.

Pretraining Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) for downstream NLP tasks is a non-trival task. We pretrained 5 BERT models that differ in the size of their training sets, mixture of formal and informal Arabic, and linguistic preprocessing. All are intended to support Arabic dialects and social media. The experiments highlight the centrality of data diversity and the efficacy of linguistically aware segmentation. They also highlight that more data or more training step do not necessitate better models. Our new models achieve new state-of-the-art results on several downstream tasks. The resulting models are released to the community under the name QARiB.

Fouzi Harrag, Maria Debbah, Kareem Darwish et al.

During the last two decades, we have progressively turned to the Internet and social media to find news, entertain conversations and share opinion. Recently, OpenAI has developed a ma-chine learning system called GPT-2 for Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2, which can pro-duce deepfake texts. It can generate blocks of text based on brief writing prompts that look like they were written by humans, facilitating the spread false or auto-generated text. In line with this progress, and in order to counteract potential dangers, several methods have been pro-posed for detecting text written by these language models. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning based model that will be able to detect if an Arabic sentence is written by humans or automatically generated by bots. Our dataset is based on tweets from a previous work, which we have crawled and extended using the Twitter API. We used GPT2-Small-Arabic to generate fake Arabic Sentences. For evaluation, we compared different recurrent neural network (RNN) word embeddings based baseline models, namely: LSTM, BI-LSTM, GRU and BI-GRU, with a transformer-based model. Our new transfer-learning model has obtained an accuracy up to 98%. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first study where ARABERT and GPT2 were combined to detect and classify the Arabic auto-generated texts.

Firoj Alam, Fahim Dalvi, Shaden Shaar et al.

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, people turned to social media to read and to share timely information including statistics, warnings, advice, and inspirational stories. Unfortunately, alongside all this useful information, there was also a new blending of medical and political misinformation and disinformation, which gave rise to the first global infodemic. While fighting this infodemic is typically thought of in terms of factuality, the problem is much broader as malicious content includes not only fake news, rumors, and conspiracy theories, but also promotion of fake cures, panic, racism, xenophobia, and mistrust in the authorities, among others. This is a complex problem that needs a holistic approach combining the perspectives of journalists, fact-checkers, policymakers, government entities, social media platforms, and society as a whole. Taking them into account we define an annotation schema and detailed annotation instructions, which reflect these perspectives. We performed initial annotations using this schema, and our initial experiments demonstrated sizable improvements over the baselines. Now, we issue a call to arms to the research community and beyond to join the fight by supporting our crowdsourcing annotation efforts.

Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak, Younes Samih et al.

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.

Firoj Alam, Shaden Shaar, Fahim Dalvi et al.

With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the political and the medical aspects of disinformation merged as the problem got elevated to a whole new level to become the first global infodemic. Fighting this infodemic has been declared one of the most important focus areas of the World Health Organization, with dangers ranging from promoting fake cures, rumors, and conspiracy theories to spreading xenophobia and panic. Addressing the issue requires solving a number of challenging problems such as identifying messages containing claims, determining their check-worthiness and factuality, and their potential to do harm as well as the nature of that harm, to mention just a few. To address this gap, we release a large dataset of 16K manually annotated tweets for fine-grained disinformation analysis that (i) focuses on COVID-19, (ii) combines the perspectives and the interests of journalists, fact-checkers, social media platforms, policy makers, and society, and (iii) covers Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, and English. Finally, we show strong evaluation results using pretrained Transformers, thus confirming the practical utility of the dataset in monolingual vs. multilingual, and single task vs. multitask settings.

Hamdy Mubarak, Ammar Rashed, Kareem Darwish et al.

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.

Kareem Darwish, Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak et al.

Diacritics (short vowels) are typically omitted when writing Arabic text, and readers have to reintroduce them to correctly pronounce words. There are two types of Arabic diacritics: the first are core-word diacritics (CW), which specify the lexical selection, and the second are case endings (CE), which typically appear at the end of the word stem and generally specify their syntactic roles. Recovering CEs is relatively harder than recovering core-word diacritics due to inter-word dependencies, which are often distant. In this paper, we use a feature-rich recurrent neural network model that uses a variety of linguistic and surface-level features to recover both core word diacritics and case endings. Our model surpasses all previous state-of-the-art systems with a CW error rate (CWER) of 2.86\% and a CE error rate (CEER) of 3.7% for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and CWER of 2.2% and CEER of 2.5% for Classical Arabic (CA). When combining diacritized word cores with case endings, the resultant word error rate is 6.0% and 4.3% for MSA and CA respectively. This highlights the effectiveness of feature engineering for such deep neural models.

Ahmed Abdelali, Mohammed Attia, Younes Samih et al.

Diacritization process attempt to restore the short vowels in Arabic written text; which typically are omitted. This process is essential for applications such as Text-to-Speech (TTS). While diacritization of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) still holds the lion share, research on dialectal Arabic (DA) diacritization is very limited. In this paper, we present our contribution and results on the automatic diacritization of two sub-dialects of Maghrebi Arabic, namely Tunisian and Moroccan, using a character-level deep neural network architecture that stacks two bi-LSTM layers over a CRF output layer. The model achieves word error rate of 2.7% and 3.6% for Moroccan and Tunisian respectively and is capable of implicitly identifying the sub-dialect of the input.

Hassan Sajjad, Fahim Dalvi, Nadir Durrani et al.

Word segmentation plays a pivotal role in improving any Arabic NLP application. Therefore, a lot of research has been spent in improving its accuracy. Off-the-shelf tools, however, are: i) complicated to use and ii) domain/dialect dependent. We explore three language-independent alternatives to morphological segmentation using: i) data-driven sub-word units, ii) characters as a unit of learning, and iii) word embeddings learned using a character CNN (Convolution Neural Network). On the tasks of Machine Translation and POS tagging, we found these methods to achieve close to, and occasionally surpass state-of-the-art performance. In our analysis, we show that a neural machine translation system is sensitive to the ratio of source and target tokens, and a ratio close to 1 or greater, gives optimal performance.

Mohamed Eldesouki, Younes Samih, Ahmed Abdelali et al.

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.

Hassan Sajjad, Nadir Durrani, Francisco Guzman et al.

The paper describes the Egyptian Arabic-to-English statistical machine translation (SMT) system that the QCRI-Columbia-NYUAD (QCN) group submitted to the NIST OpenMT'2015 competition. The competition focused on informal dialectal Arabic, as used in SMS, chat, and speech. Thus, our efforts focused on processing and standardizing Arabic, e.g., using tools such as 3arrib and MADAMIRA. We further trained a phrase-based SMT system using state-of-the-art features and components such as operation sequence model, class-based language model, sparse features, neural network joint model, genre-based hierarchically-interpolated language model, unsupervised transliteration mining, phrase-table merging, and hypothesis combination. Our system ranked second on all three genres.