Wikipedia articles (content pages) are commonly used corpora in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, especially in low-resource languages other than English. Yet, a few research studies have studied the three Arabic Wikipedia editions, Arabic Wikipedia (AR), Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia (ARZ), and Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia (ARY), and documented issues in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia edition regarding the massive automatic creation of its articles using template-based translation from English to Arabic without human involvement, overwhelming the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia with articles that do not only have low-quality content but also with articles that do not represent the Egyptian people, their culture, and their dialect. In this paper, we aim to mitigate the problem of template translation that occurred in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia by identifying these template-translated articles and their characteristics through exploratory analysis and building automatic detection systems. We first explore the content of the three Arabic Wikipedia editions in terms of density, quality, and human contributions and utilize the resulting insights to build multivariate machine learning classifiers leveraging articles’ metadata to detect the template-translated articles automatically. We then publicly deploy and host the best-performing classifier as an online application called ‘Egyptian Wikipedia Scanner’ and release the extracted, filtered, labeled, and preprocessed datasets to the research community to benefit from our datasets and the online, web-based detection system.

Instruction tuning has emerged as a prominent methodology for teaching Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions. However, current instruction datasets predominantly cater to English or are derived from English-dominated LLMs, leading to inherent biases toward Western culture. This bias negatively impacts non-English languages such as Arabic and the unique culture of the Arab region. This paper addresses this limitation by introducing CIDAR, the first open Arabic instruction-tuning dataset culturally aligned by native Arabic speakers. CIDAR contains 10,000 instruction and output pairs that represent the Arab region. We discuss the cultural relevance of CIDAR via the analysis and comparison to a few models fine-tuned on other datasets. Our experiments indicate that models fine-tuned on CIDAR achieve better cultural alignment compared to those fine-tuned on 30x more data.

Text classification systems have been proven vulnerable to adversarial text examples, modified versions of the original text examples that are often unnoticed by human eyes, yet can force text classification models to alter their classification. Often, research works quantifying the impact of adversarial text attacks have been applied only to models trained in English. In this paper, we introduce the first word-level study of adversarial attacks in Arabic. Specifically, we use a synonym (word-level) attack using a Masked Language Modeling (MLM) task with a BERT model in a black-box setting to assess the robustness of the state-of-the-art text classification models to adversarial attacks in Arabic. To evaluate the grammatical and semantic similarities of the newly produced adversarial examples using our synonym BERT-based attack, we invite four human evaluators to assess and compare the produced adversarial examples with their original examples. We also study the transferability of these newly produced Arabic adversarial examples to various models and investigate the effectiveness of defense mechanisms against these adversarial examples on the BERT models. We find that fine-tuned BERT models were more susceptible to our synonym attacks than the other Deep Neural Networks (DNN) models like WordCNN and WordLSTM we trained. We also find that fine-tuned BERT models were more susceptible to transferred attacks. We, lastly, find that fine-tuned BERT models successfully regain at least 2% in accuracy after applying adversarial training as an initial defense mechanism.

Wikipedia articles are a common source of training data for Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, especially as a source for corpora in languages other than English. However, research has shown that not all Wikipedia editions are produced organically by native speakers, and there are substantial levels of automation and translation activities in the Wikipedia project that could negatively impact the degree to which they truly represent the language and the culture of native speakers. To encourage transparency in the Wikipedia project, Wikimedia Foundation introduced the depth metric as an indication of the degree of collaboration or how frequently users edit a Wikipedia edition’s articles. While a promising start, this depth metric suffers from a few serious problems, like a lack of adequate handling of inflation of edits metric and a lack of full utilization of users-related metrics. In this paper, we propose the DEPTH+ metric, provide its mathematical definitions, and describe how it reflects a better representation of the depth of human collaborativeness. We also quantify the bot activities in Wikipedia and offer a bot-free depth metric after the removal of the bot-created articles and the bot-made edits on the Wikipedia articles.

Wikipedia articles are a widely used source of training data for Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, particularly as corpora for low-resource languages like Arabic. However, it is essential to understand the extent to which these corpora reflect the representative contributions of native speakers, especially when many entries in a given language are directly translated from other languages or automatically generated through automated mechanisms. In this paper, we study the performance implications of using inorganic corpora that are not representative of native speakers and are generated through automated techniques such as bot generation or automated template-based translation. The case of the Arabic Wikipedia editions gives a unique case study of this since the Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia edition (ARY) is small but representative, the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia edition (ARZ) is large but unrepresentative, and the Modern Standard Arabic Wikipedia edition (AR) is both large and more representative. We intrinsically evaluate the performance of two main NLP upstream tasks, namely word representation and language modeling, using word analogy evaluations and fill-mask evaluations using our two newly created datasets: Arab States Analogy Dataset (ASAD) and Masked Arab States Dataset (MASD). We demonstrate that for good NLP performance, we need both large and organic corpora; neither alone is sufficient. We show that producing large corpora through automated means can be a counter-productive, producing models that both perform worse and lack cultural richness and meaningful representation of the Arabic language and its native speakers.

The use of word embeddings is an important NLP technique for extracting meaningful conclusions from corpora of human text. One important question that has been raised about word embeddings is the degree of gender bias learned from corpora. Bolukbasi et al. (2016) proposed an important technique for quantifying gender bias in word embeddings that, at its heart, is lexically based and relies on sets of highly gendered word pairs (e.g., mother/father and madam/sir) and a list of professions words (e.g., doctor and nurse). In this paper, we document problems that arise with this method to quantify gender bias in diachronic corpora. Focusing on Arabic and Chinese corpora, in particular, we document clear changes in profession words used over time and, somewhat surprisingly, even changes in the simpler gendered defining set word pairs. We further document complications in languages such as Arabic, where many words are highly polysemous/homonymous, especially female professions words.

Wikipedia is a common source of training data for Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, especially as a source for corpora in languages other than English. However, for many downstream NLP tasks, it is important to understand the degree to which these corpora reflect representative contributions of native speakers. In particular, many entries in a given language may be translated from other languages or produced through other automated mechanisms. Language models built using corpora like Wikipedia can embed history, culture, bias, stereotypes, politics, and more, but it is important to understand whose views are actually being represented. In this paper, we present a case study focusing specifically on differences among the Arabic Wikipedia editions (Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, and Moroccan). In particular, we document issues in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia with automatic creation/generation and translation of content pages from English without human supervision. These issues could substantially affect the performance and accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) trained from these corpora, producing models that lack the cultural richness and meaningful representation of native speakers. Fortunately, the metadata maintained by Wikipedia provides visibility into these issues, but unfortunately, this is not the case for all corpora used to train LLMs.