AraDetox: A Multi-Dialect Arabic Detoxification Dataset

Mo El-Haj


Abstract
Arabic harmful-language detection has received considerable attention, yet Arabic text detoxification remains underexplored. We introduce AraDetox, a multi-dialect Arabic detoxification dataset comprising 10,500 harmful social-media posts and 84,000 detoxified rewrites generated using GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash across Modern Standard Arabic, Gulf, Levantine, and Egyptian Arabic. The generated outputs were assessed through human evaluation and automatic analyses of lexical change, semantic preservation, sentiment, and dialectal style. Results show that detoxification is primarily a meaning-preserving rewriting task: substantial lexical and structural reformulation is accompanied by consistently high semantic similarity. Human evaluation confirms successful harmful-language removal while largely preserving the original meaning. Dialectal analyses further indicate that the generated variants exhibit measurable stylistic alignment with reference Arabic dialect corpora. Comparison with existing resources highlights two complementary approaches to detoxification: minimal-edit lexical substitution and meaning-preserving reformulation. Our findings demonstrate that large-scale Arabic detoxification resources can be constructed through LLM-assisted generation and human verification. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/ArabicNLP-UK/AraDetox to support future research on Arabic detoxification, safe text generation, and multi-dialect Arabic NLP.
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-main.4
Volume:
Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Tamer Elsayed, Houda Bouamor, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Hend Al-Khalifa, Ahmed Abdelali, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Abdellah El Mekki, Kareem Darwish, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Hamzah Luqman, Salam Khalifa, Samar Magdy, Zaid Alyafeai, Injy Hamed, Wajdi Zaghouani, Imed Zitouni
Venue:
ArabicNLP
SIG:
SIGARAB
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
33–47
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-main.4/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mo El-Haj. 2026. AraDetox: A Multi-Dialect Arabic Detoxification Dataset. In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference, pages 33–47, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AraDetox: A Multi-Dialect Arabic Detoxification Dataset (El-Haj, ArabicNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-main.4.pdf