Supporting Undotted Arabic with Pre-trained Language Models
This addresses a practical issue for social media platforms and NLP applications in Arabic, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a new data variation.
The paper tackled the problem of classifying undotted Arabic text, which users create to bypass content filters, by adapting pre-trained language models without additional training, achieving nearly perfect performance on one of two downstream tasks.
We observe a recent behaviour on social media, in which users intentionally remove consonantal dots from Arabic letters, in order to bypass content-classification algorithms. Content classification is typically done by fine-tuning pre-trained language models, which have been recently employed by many natural-language-processing applications. In this work we study the effect of applying pre-trained Arabic language models on "undotted" Arabic texts. We suggest several ways of supporting undotted texts with pre-trained models, without additional training, and measure their performance on two Arabic natural-language-processing downstream tasks. The results are encouraging; in one of the tasks our method shows nearly perfect performance.