Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying word-units that correspond to mentions as location, organization, person, or currency. In this shared task we tackle flat-entity classification for Arabic, where for each word-unit a single entity should be identified. To resolve the classification problem we propose StagedNER a novel technique to fine-tuning NER downstream tasks that divides the learning process of a transformer-model into two phases, where a model is tasked to learn sequence tags and then entity tags rather than learn both together simultaneously for an input sequence. We create an ensemble of two base models using this method that yield a score of on the development set and an F1 performance of 90.03% on the validation set and 91.95% on the test set.

Poetry generation tends to be a complicated task given meter and rhyme constraints. Previous work resorted to exhaustive methods in-order to employ poetic elements. In this paper we leave pre-trained models, GPT-J and BERTShared to recognize patterns of meters and rhyme to generate classical Arabic poetry and present our findings and results on how well both models could pick up on these classical Arabic poetic elements.

Hate Speech is an increasingly common occurrence in verbal and textual exchanges on online platforms, where many users, especially those from vulnerable minorities, are in danger of being attacked or harassed via text messages, posts, comments, or articles. Therefore, it is crucial to detect and filter out hate speech in the various forms of text encountered on online and social platforms. In this paper, we present our work on the shared task of detecting hate speech in dialectical Arabic tweets as part of the OSACT shared task on Fine-grained Hate Speech Detection. Normally, tweets have a short length, and hence do not have sufficient context for language models, which in turn makes a classification task challenging. To contribute to sub-task A, we leverage MARBERT’s pre-trained contextual word representations and aim to improve their semantic quality using a cluster-based approach. Our work explores MARBERT’s embedding space and assess its geometric properties in-order to achieve better representations and subsequently better classification performance. We propose to improve the isotropic word representations of MARBERT via clustering. we compare the word representations generated by our approach to MARBERT’s default word representations via feeding each to a bidirectional LSTM to detect offensive and non-offensive tweets. Our results show that enhancing the isotropy of an embedding space can boost performance. Our system scores 81.2% on accuracy and a macro-averaged F1 score of 79.1% on sub-task A’s development set and achieves 76.5% for accuracy and an F1 score of 74.2% on the test set.