Ibraheem Tuffaha


2021

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ALUE: Arabic Language Understanding Evaluation
Haitham Seelawi | Ibraheem Tuffaha | Mahmoud Gzawi | Wael Farhan | Bashar Talafha | Riham Badawi | Zyad Sober | Oday Al-Dweik | Abed Alhakim Freihat | Hussein Al-Natsheh
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

The emergence of Multi-task learning (MTL)models in recent years has helped push thestate of the art in Natural Language Un-derstanding (NLU). We strongly believe thatmany NLU problems in Arabic are especiallypoised to reap the benefits of such models. Tothis end we propose the Arabic Language Un-derstanding Evaluation Benchmark (ALUE),based on 8 carefully selected and previouslypublished tasks. For five of these, we providenew privately held evaluation datasets to en-sure the fairness and validity of our benchmark. We also provide a diagnostic dataset to helpresearchers probe the inner workings of theirmodels.Our initial experiments show thatMTL models outperform their singly trainedcounterparts on most tasks. But in order to en-tice participation from the wider community,we stick to publishing singly trained baselinesonly. Nonetheless, our analysis reveals thatthere is plenty of room for improvement inArabic NLU. We hope that ALUE will playa part in helping our community realize someof these improvements. Interested researchersare invited to submit their results to our online,and publicly accessible leaderboard.

2020

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Multi-dialect Arabic BERT for Country-level Dialect Identification
Bashar Talafha | Mohammad Ali | Muhy Eddin Za’ter | Haitham Seelawi | Ibraheem Tuffaha | Mostafa Samir | Wael Farhan | Hussein Al-Natsheh
Proceedings of the Fifth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

Arabic dialect identification is a complex problem for a number of inherent properties of the language itself. In this paper, we present the experiments conducted, and the models developed by our competing team, Mawdoo3 AI, along the way to achieving our winning solution to subtask 1 of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task. The dialect identification subtask provides 21,000 country-level labeled tweets covering all 21 Arab countries. An unlabeled corpus of 10M tweets from the same domain is also presented by the competition organizers for optional use. Our winning solution itself came in the form of an ensemble of different training iterations of our pre-trained BERT model, which achieved a micro-averaged F1-score of 26.78% on the subtask at hand. We publicly release the pre-trained language model component of our winning solution under the name of Multi-dialect-Arabic-BERT model, for any interested researcher out there.

2019

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Pretrained Ensemble Learning for Fine-Grained Propaganda Detection
Ali Fadel | Ibraheem Tuffaha | Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda

In this paper, we describe our team’s effort on the fine-grained propaganda detection on sentence level classification (SLC) task of NLP4IF 2019 workshop co-located with the EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 conference. Our top performing system results come from applying ensemble average on three pretrained models to make their predictions. The first two models use the uncased and cased versions of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) (Devlin et al., 2018) while the third model uses Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) (Cer et al. 2018). Out of 26 participating teams, our system is ranked in the first place with 68.8312 F1-score on the development dataset and in the sixth place with 61.3870 F1-score on the testing dataset.

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Neural Arabic Text Diacritization: State of the Art Results and a Novel Approach for Machine Translation
Ali Fadel | Ibraheem Tuffaha | Bara’ Al-Jawarneh | Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Asian Translation

In this work, we present several deep learning models for the automatic diacritization of Arabic text. Our models are built using two main approaches, viz. Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), with several enhancements such as 100-hot encoding, embeddings, Conditional Random Field (CRF) and Block-Normalized Gradient (BNG). The models are tested on the only freely available benchmark dataset and the results show that our models are either better or on par with other models, which require language-dependent post-processing steps, unlike ours. Moreover, we show that diacritics in Arabic can be used to enhance the models of NLP tasks such as Machine Translation (MT) by proposing the Translation over Diacritization (ToD) approach.

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Tha3aroon at NSURL-2019 Task 8: Semantic Question Similarity in Arabic
Ali Fadel | Ibraheem Tuffaha | Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on NLP Solutions for Under Resourced Languages (NSURL 2019) co-located with ICNLSP 2019 - Short Papers