Mohanad Mohamed
2025
Enhancing Arabic NLP Tasks through Character-Level Models and Data Augmentation
Mohanad Mohamed
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Sadam Al-Azani
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
This study introduces a character-level approach specifically designed for Arabic NLP tasks, offering a novel and highly effective solution to the unique challenges inherent in Arabic language processing. It presents a thorough comparative study of various character-level models, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), pre-trained transformers (CANINE), and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory networks (BiLSTMs), assessing their performance and exploring the impact of different data augmentation techniques on enhancing their effectiveness. Additionally, it introduces two innovative Arabic-specific data augmentation methods—vowel deletion and style transfer—and rigorously evaluates their effectiveness. The proposed approach was evaluated on Arabic privacy policy classification task as a case study, demonstrating significant improvements in model performance, reporting a micro-averaged F1-score of 93.8%, surpassing state-of-the-art models.