Bhuiyan Sanjid Shafique, Ashmal Vayani, Muhammad Maaz, Hanoona Abdul Rasheed, Dinura Dissanayake, Mohammed Irfan Kurpath, Yahya Hmaiti, Go Inoue, Jean Lahoud, Md. Safirur Rashid, Shadid Intisar Quasem, Maheen Fatima, Franco Vidal, Mykola Maslych, Ketan Pravin More, Sanoojan Baliah, Hasindri Watawana, Yuhao Li, Fabian Farestam, Leon Schaller, Roman Tymtsiv, Simon Weber, Hisham Cholakkal, Ivan Laptev, Shin’ichi Satoh, Michael Felsberg, Mubarak Shah, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

The widespread absence of diacritical marks in Arabic text poses a significant challenge for Arabic natural language processing (NLP).This paper explores instances of naturally occurring diacritics, referred to as "diacritics in the wild," to unveil patterns and latent information across six diverse genres: news articles, novels, children's books, poetry, political documents, and ChatGPT outputs.We present a new annotated dataset that maps realworld partially diacritized words to their maximal full diacritization in context.Additionally, we propose extensions to the analyze-anddisambiguate approach in Arabic NLP to leverage these diacritics, resulting in notable improvements.Our contributions encompass a thorough analysis, valuable datasets, and an extended diacritization algorithm.We release our code and datasets as open source.

Ad text generation is the task of creating compelling text from an advertising asset that describes products or services, such as a landing page. In advertising, diversity plays an important role in enhancing the effectiveness of an ad text, mitigating a phenomenon called “ad fatigue,” where users become disengaged due to repetitive exposure to the same advertisement. Despite numerous efforts in ad text generation, the aspect of diversifying ad texts has received limited attention, particularly in non-English languages like Japanese. To address this, we present CAMERA³, an evaluation dataset for controllable text generation in the advertising domain in Japanese. Our dataset includes 3,980 ad texts written by expert annotators, taking into account various aspects of ad appeals. We make CAMERA³ publicly available, allowing researchers to examine the capabilities of recent NLG models in controllable text generation in a real-world scenario.

There have been many attempts to model the morphological richness and complexity of Arabic, leading to numerous Part-of-Speech (POS) tagsets that differ in terms of (a) which morphological features they represent, (b) how they represent them, and (c) the degree of specification of said features. Tagset granularity plays an important role in determining how annotated data can be used and for what applications. Due to the diversity among existing tagsets, many annotated corpora for Arabic cannot be easily combined, which exacerbates the Arabic resource poverty situation. In this work, we propose an intermediate tagset designed to facilitate the conversion and unification of different tagsets used to annotate Arabic corpora. This new tagset acts as a bridge between different annotation schemes, simplifying the integration of annotated corpora and promoting collaboration across the projects using them.

Grammatical error correction (GEC) is a wellexplored problem in English with many existing models and datasets.However, research on GEC in morphologically rich languages has been limited due to challenges such as data scarcity and language complexity.In this paper, we present the first results on Arabic GEC using two newly developed Transformer-based pretrained sequence-to-sequence models.We also define the task of multi-class Arabic grammatical error detection (GED) and present the first results on multi-class Arabic GED.We show that using GED information as an auxiliary input in GEC models improves GEC performance across three datasets spanning different genres.Moreover, we also investigate the use of contextual morphological preprocessing in aiding GEC systems.Our models achieve SOTA results on two Arabic GEC shared task datasets and establish a strong benchmark on a recently created dataset.We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.1

In recent years, the focus on developing natural language processing (NLP) tools for Arabic has shifted from Modern Standard Arabic to various Arabic dialects. Various corpora of various sizes and representing different genres, have been created for a number of Arabic dialects. As far as Gulf Arabic is concerned, Gumar Corpus (Khalifa et al., 2016) is the largest corpus, to date, that includes data representing the dialectal Arabic of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman), particularly in the genre of “online forum novels”. In this paper, we present the Bahrain Corpus. Our objective is to create a specialized corpus of the Bahraini Arabic dialect, which includes written texts as well as transcripts of audio files, belonging to a different genre (folktales, comedy shows, plays, cooking shows, etc.). The corpus comprises 620K words, carefully curated. We provide automatic morphological annotations of the full corpus using state-of-the-art morphosyntactic disambiguation for Gulf Arabic. We validate the quality of the annotations on a 7.6K word sample. We plan to make the annotated sample as well as the full corpus publicly available to support researchers interested in Arabic NLP.

We present CAMeL Tools, a collection of open-source tools for Arabic natural language processing in Python. CAMeL Tools currently provides utilities for pre-processing, morphological modeling, Dialect Identification, Named Entity Recognition and Sentiment Analysis. In this paper, we describe the design of CAMeL Tools and the functionalities it provides.

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging for morphologically rich languages such as Arabic is a challenging problem because of their enormous tag sets.One reason for this is that in the tagging scheme for such languages, a complete POS tag is formed by combining tags from multiple tag sets defined for each morphosyntactic category.Previous approaches in Arabic POS tagging applied one model for each morphosyntactic tagging task, without utilizing shared information between the tasks.In this paper, we propose an approach that utilizes this information by jointly modeling multiple morphosyntactic tagging tasks with a multi-task learning framework.We also propose a method of incorporating tag dictionary information into our neural models by combining word representations with representations of the sets of possible tags.Our experiments showed that the joint model with tag dictionary information results in an accuracy of 91.38% on the Penn Arabic Treebank data set, with an absolute improvement of 2.11% over the current state-of-the-art tagger. 1