@inproceedings{abbas-etal-2026-shaer,
title = "Shaer: Controlled {A}rabic Poetry Generation with Meter Subform and Semantic Conditioning",
author = "Abbas, Ahmad and
Fakih, Tamara and
Fakih, Nour and
Mohanna, Ammar",
editor = "Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad and
Elsayed, Tamer and
Bouamor, Houda and
El-Beltagy, Samhaa and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Abdelali, Ahmed and
Elmadany, AbdelRahim and
El Mekki, Abdellah and
Darwish, Kareem and
Alkhereyf, Sakhar and
Luqman, Hamzah and
Khalifa, Salam and
Magdy, Samar and
Alyafeai, Zaid and
Hamed, Injy and
Zaghouani, Wajdi and
Zitouni, Imed",
booktitle = "Proceedings of The Fourth {A}rabic Natural Language Processing Conference",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-main.14/",
pages = "179--199",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-473-6",
abstract = "Classical Arabic poetry generation requires simultaneously satisfying semantic, linguistic, and fine-grained prosodic constraints. Existing systems typically control broad poetic attributes but do not jointly model semantic intent, meter subform, and poem length. We present Shaer, a controllable Classical Arabic poetry generation framework jointly conditioned on natural-language descriptions, meter subforms, and target hemistich counts. To support this task, we construct an enriched corpus of 116,032 classical Arabic poems derived from Ashaar, containing normalized meter-subform labels and automatically generated, validated semantic descriptions. We then adapt Yehia-7B using QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning with a completion-only objective. Our evaluation combines automatic assessment of base-meter conformity, requested-subform adherence, and length control with three LLM judges, blinded human evaluation, and memorization analysis. Shaer achieves 95.17{\%} base-meter accuracy, 91.75{\%} poem-level meter-subform accuracy, and 83.40{\%} exact count accuracy. Relative to its untuned foundation model, these results represent gains of 68.68, 57.77, and 38.93 percentage points, respectively; Shaer also attains the highest base-meter accuracy among all evaluated systems. Multi-LLM evaluation and a blinded human assessment of top-ranked outputs further indicate competitive semantic and literary quality. Finally, analysis of all 3,481 test generations finds no exact copies from the training corpus or paired source poems. Code, models, and datasets are publicly available."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="abbas-etal-2026-shaer">
<titleInfo>
<title>Shaer: Controlled Arabic Poetry Generation with Meter Subform and Semantic Conditioning</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ahmad</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Abbas</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Tamara</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Fakih</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Nour</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Fakih</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ammar</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Mohanna</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Muhammad</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Abdul-Mageed</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Tamer</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Elsayed</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Houda</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bouamor</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Samhaa</namePart>
<namePart type="family">El-Beltagy</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hend</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Al-Khalifa</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ahmed</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Abdelali</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">AbdelRahim</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Elmadany</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Abdellah</namePart>
<namePart type="family">El Mekki</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Kareem</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Darwish</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sakhar</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Alkhereyf</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hamzah</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Luqman</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Salam</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Khalifa</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Samar</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Magdy</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Zaid</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Alyafeai</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Injy</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Hamed</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Wajdi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zaghouani</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Imed</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zitouni</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-473-6</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Classical Arabic poetry generation requires simultaneously satisfying semantic, linguistic, and fine-grained prosodic constraints. Existing systems typically control broad poetic attributes but do not jointly model semantic intent, meter subform, and poem length. We present Shaer, a controllable Classical Arabic poetry generation framework jointly conditioned on natural-language descriptions, meter subforms, and target hemistich counts. To support this task, we construct an enriched corpus of 116,032 classical Arabic poems derived from Ashaar, containing normalized meter-subform labels and automatically generated, validated semantic descriptions. We then adapt Yehia-7B using QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning with a completion-only objective. Our evaluation combines automatic assessment of base-meter conformity, requested-subform adherence, and length control with three LLM judges, blinded human evaluation, and memorization analysis. Shaer achieves 95.17% base-meter accuracy, 91.75% poem-level meter-subform accuracy, and 83.40% exact count accuracy. Relative to its untuned foundation model, these results represent gains of 68.68, 57.77, and 38.93 percentage points, respectively; Shaer also attains the highest base-meter accuracy among all evaluated systems. Multi-LLM evaluation and a blinded human assessment of top-ranked outputs further indicate competitive semantic and literary quality. Finally, analysis of all 3,481 test generations finds no exact copies from the training corpus or paired source poems. Code, models, and datasets are publicly available.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">abbas-etal-2026-shaer</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-main.14/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-10</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>179</start>
<end>199</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Shaer: Controlled Arabic Poetry Generation with Meter Subform and Semantic Conditioning
%A Abbas, Ahmad
%A Fakih, Tamara
%A Fakih, Nour
%A Mohanna, Ammar
%Y Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad
%Y Elsayed, Tamer
%Y Bouamor, Houda
%Y El-Beltagy, Samhaa
%Y Al-Khalifa, Hend
%Y Abdelali, Ahmed
%Y Elmadany, AbdelRahim
%Y El Mekki, Abdellah
%Y Darwish, Kareem
%Y Alkhereyf, Sakhar
%Y Luqman, Hamzah
%Y Khalifa, Salam
%Y Magdy, Samar
%Y Alyafeai, Zaid
%Y Hamed, Injy
%Y Zaghouani, Wajdi
%Y Zitouni, Imed
%S Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-473-6
%F abbas-etal-2026-shaer
%X Classical Arabic poetry generation requires simultaneously satisfying semantic, linguistic, and fine-grained prosodic constraints. Existing systems typically control broad poetic attributes but do not jointly model semantic intent, meter subform, and poem length. We present Shaer, a controllable Classical Arabic poetry generation framework jointly conditioned on natural-language descriptions, meter subforms, and target hemistich counts. To support this task, we construct an enriched corpus of 116,032 classical Arabic poems derived from Ashaar, containing normalized meter-subform labels and automatically generated, validated semantic descriptions. We then adapt Yehia-7B using QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning with a completion-only objective. Our evaluation combines automatic assessment of base-meter conformity, requested-subform adherence, and length control with three LLM judges, blinded human evaluation, and memorization analysis. Shaer achieves 95.17% base-meter accuracy, 91.75% poem-level meter-subform accuracy, and 83.40% exact count accuracy. Relative to its untuned foundation model, these results represent gains of 68.68, 57.77, and 38.93 percentage points, respectively; Shaer also attains the highest base-meter accuracy among all evaluated systems. Multi-LLM evaluation and a blinded human assessment of top-ranked outputs further indicate competitive semantic and literary quality. Finally, analysis of all 3,481 test generations finds no exact copies from the training corpus or paired source poems. Code, models, and datasets are publicly available.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-main.14/
%P 179-199
Markdown (Informal)
[Shaer: Controlled Arabic Poetry Generation with Meter Subform and Semantic Conditioning](https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-main.14/) (Abbas et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
ACL