CIDAR: Culturally Relevant Instruction Dataset For Arabic
This addresses the problem of cultural bias in LLMs for Arabic speakers, though it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new domain.
The paper tackles the bias in instruction datasets towards Western culture by introducing CIDAR, the first open Arabic instruction-tuning dataset culturally-aligned by human reviewers, containing 10,000 pairs to enrich LLM alignment with Arabic culture.
Instruction tuning has emerged as a prominent methodology for teaching Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions. However, current instruction datasets predominantly cater to English or are derived from English-dominated LLMs, resulting in inherent biases toward Western culture. This bias significantly impacts the linguistic structures of non-English languages such as Arabic, which has a distinct grammar reflective of the diverse cultures across the Arab region. This paper addresses this limitation by introducing CIDAR: https://hf.co/datasets/arbml/CIDAR, the first open Arabic instruction-tuning dataset culturally-aligned by human reviewers. CIDAR contains 10,000 instruction and output pairs that represent the Arab region. We discuss the cultural relevance of CIDAR via the analysis and comparison to other models fine-tuned on other datasets. Our experiments show that CIDAR can help enrich research efforts in aligning LLMs with the Arabic culture. All the code is available at https://github.com/ARBML/CIDAR.