CIDAR: Culturally Relevant Instruction Dataset For Arabic

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.

Dotless Representation of Arabic Text: Analysis and Modeling

This paper presents a novel dotless representation of Arabic text as an alternative to the standard Arabic text representation. We delve into its implications through comprehensive analysis across five diverse corpora and four different tokenization techniques. We explore the impact of dotless representation on the relationships between tokenization granularity and vocabulary size and compare them with standard text representation. Moreover, we analyze the information density of dotless versus standard text using text entropy calculations. To delve deeper into the implications of the dotless representation, statistical and neural language models are constructed using the various text corpora and tokenization techniques. A comparative assessment is then made against language models developed using the standard Arabic text representation. This multifaceted analysis provides valuable insights into the potential advantages and challenges associated with the dotless representation. Last but not the least, utilizing parallel corpora, we draw comparisons between the text analysis of Arabic and English to gain further insights. Our findings shed light on the potential benefits of dotless representation for various NLP tasks, paving the way for further exploration for Arabic natural language processing.

Ashaar: Automatic Analysis and Generation of Arabic Poetry Using Deep Learning Approaches

Poetry holds immense significance within the cultural and traditional fabric of any nation. It serves as a vehicle for poets to articulate their emotions, preserve customs, and convey the essence of their culture. Arabic poetry is no exception, having played a cherished role in the heritage of the Arabic community throughout history and maintaining its relevance in the present era. Typically, comprehending Arabic poetry necessitates the expertise of a linguist who can analyze its content and assess its quality. This paper presents the introduction of a framework called \textit{Ashaar} https://github.com/ARBML/Ashaar, which encompasses a collection of datasets and pre-trained models designed specifically for the analysis and generation of Arabic poetry. The pipeline established within our proposed approach encompasses various aspects of poetry, such as meter, theme, and era classification. It also incorporates automatic poetry diacritization, enabling more intricate analyses like automated extraction of the \textit{Arudi} style. Additionally, we explore the feasibility of generating conditional poetry through the pre-training of a character-based GPT model. Furthermore, as part of this endeavor, we provide four datasets: one for poetry generation, another for diacritization, and two for Arudi-style prediction. These datasets aim to facilitate research and development in the field of Arabic poetry by enabling researchers and enthusiasts to delve into the nuances of this rich literary tradition.

A Bibliography of Multiple Sclerosis Lesions Detection Methods using Brain MRIs

Introduction: Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease that affects millions of people across the globe. MS can critically affect different organs of the central nervous system such as the eyes, the spinal cord, and the brain. Background: To help physicians in diagnosing MS lesions, computer-aided methods are widely used. In this regard, a considerable research has been carried out in the area of automatic detection and segmentation of MS lesions in magnetic resonance images (MRIs). Methodology: In this study, we review the different approaches that have been used in computer-aided detection and segmentation of MS lesions. Our review resulted in categorizing MS lesion segmentation approaches into six broad categories: data-driven, statistical, supervised machine learning, unsupervised machine learning, fuzzy, and deep learning-based techniques. We critically analyze the different techniques under these approaches and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Results: From the study, we observe that a considerable amount of work, around 25% of related literature, is focused on statistical-based MS lesion segmentation techniques, followed by 21.15% for data-driven based methods, 19.23% for deep learning and 15.38% for supervised methods. Implication: The study points out the challenges/gaps to be addressed in future research. The study shows the work which has been done in last one decade in detection and segmentation of MS lesions. The results show that, in recent years, deep learning methods are outperforming all the others methods.