Related papers: SmolKalam: Ensemble Quality-Filtered Translation a…

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are integral to many modern natural language processing (NLP) systems. Although multilingual models cover a wide range of languages, they often grapple with challenges like high inference costs and a lack…

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…

Pretraining monolingual language models have been proven to be vital for performance in Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the role of data in Arabic Pretrained Language Models…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, enhancing capabilities in both language understanding and generation across diverse domains. However, developing LLMs for Arabic presents…

The performance of large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) depends heavily on the quality and scale of their pre-training datasets. Recent research shows that large multimodal models trained on natural documents…

We present Hala, a family of Arabic-centric instruction and translation models built with our translate-and-tune pipeline. We first compress a strong AR$\leftrightarrow$EN teacher to FP8 (yielding $\sim$2$\times$ higher throughput with no…

Multilingual data from the web is essential for LLM pretraining. Yet, scraping it is expensive, and research groups repeatedly crawl the same content. For example, we found that over 40\% of tokens across major Arabic web corpora are…

Statistical machine translation for dialectal Arabic is characterized by a lack of data since data acquisition involves the transcription and translation of spoken language. In this study we develop techniques for extracting parallel data…

Neural networks have become the state-of-the-art approach for machine translation (MT) in many languages. While linguistically-motivated tokenization techniques were shown to have significant effects on the performance of statistical MT, it…

In this paper, we explore alternative ways to train a neural machine translation system in a multi-domain scenario. We investigate data concatenation (with fine tuning), model stacking (multi-level fine tuning), data selection and…

Despite the recent remarkable advances in neural machine translation, translation quality for low-resource language pairs remains subpar. Ensembling multiple systems is a widely adopted technique to enhance performance, often accomplished…

We present the second ever evaluated Arabic dialect-to-dialect machine translation effort, and the first to leverage external resources beyond a small parallel corpus. The subject has not previously received serious attention due to lack of…

Machine translation between Arabic and Hebrew has so far been limited by a lack of parallel corpora, despite the political and cultural importance of this language pair. Previous work relied on manually-crafted grammars or pivoting via…

Advances in English language representation enabled a more sample-efficient pre-training task by Efficiently Learning an Encoder that Classifies Token Replacements Accurately (ELECTRA). Which, instead of training a model to recover masked…

This paper addresses the critical need for democratizing large language models (LLM) in the Arab world, a region that has seen slower progress in developing models comparable to state-of-the-art offerings like GPT-4 or ChatGPT 3.5, due to a…

Pre-training state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) requires vast amounts of clean and diverse text data. While the open development of large high-quality English pre-training datasets has seen substantial recent progress, training…

Most of previous work on learning diacritization of the Arabic language relied on training models from scratch. In this paper, we investigate how to leverage pre-trained language models to learn diacritization. We finetune token-free…

This survey offers a comprehensive overview of Large Language Models (LLMs) designed for Arabic language and its dialects. It covers key architectures, including encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, along with the…

High-resource languages such as English, enables the pretraining of high-quality large language models (LLMs). The same can not be said for most other languages as LLMs still underperform for non-English languages, likely due to a gap in…

We present an efficient method for adapting a monolingual Large Language Model (LLM) to another language, addressing challenges of catastrophic forgetting and tokenizer limitations. We focus this study on adapting Llama 2 to Arabic. Our…