Ummar Abbas
2026
Fanar-Sadiq: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Grounded Islamic QA
Ummar Abbas | Mourad Ouzzani | Mohamed Y. Eltabakh | Omar Sinan | Gagan Bhatia | Hamdy Mubarak | Majd Hawasly | Mohammed Qusay Hashim | Kareem Mohamed Darwish | Firoj Alam
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Ummar Abbas | Mourad Ouzzani | Mohamed Y. Eltabakh | Omar Sinan | Gagan Bhatia | Hamdy Mubarak | Majd Hawasly | Mohammed Qusay Hashim | Kareem Mohamed Darwish | Firoj Alam
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Large language models (LLMs) can answer religious knowledge queries fluently, yet they often hallucinate and misattribute sources, which is especially consequential in Islamic settings where users expect grounding in canonical texts (Qur’an and Hadith) and jurisprudential (fiqh) nuance. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves grounding, however, a single retrieve-then-generate pipeline is insufficient for diverse Islamic queries, including verbatim scripture, citation-grounded guidance, and rule-constrained computations such as zakat and inheritance. To address these challenges, we present Fanar-Sadiq, a bilingual Arabic-English Islamic QA system built on a multi-agent, tool-augmented architecture. It is a core component of the Fanar AI platform. Fanar-Sadiq routes Islamic queries to specialized modules within an agentic tool architecture. It supports intent-aware routing, retrieval-grounded fiqh answers with normalized citations and verification traces, exact verse lookup with quotation validation, and deterministic Sunni zakat and inheritance calculators with madhhab-sensitive branching. We evaluate the end-to-end system on public Islamic QA benchmarks and show strong effectiveness and efficiency. It is publicly accessible through an API and Web application and has received over 1.9M accesses in less than a year (https://api.fanar.qa/docs).
2023
NxPlain: A Web-based Tool for Discovery of Latent Concepts
Fahim Dalvi | Nadir Durrani | Hassan Sajjad | Tamim Jaban | Mus’ab Husaini | Ummar Abbas
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Fahim Dalvi | Nadir Durrani | Hassan Sajjad | Tamim Jaban | Mus’ab Husaini | Ummar Abbas
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
The proliferation of deep neural networks in various domains has seen an increased need for the interpretability of these models, especially in scenarios where fairness and trust are as important as model performance. A lot of independent work is being carried out to: i) analyze what linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge is learned within these models, and ii) highlight the salient parts of the input. We present NxPlain, a web-app that provides an explanation of a model’s prediction using latent concepts. NxPlain discovers latent concepts learned in a deep NLP model, provides an interpretation of the knowledge learned in the model, and explains its predictions based on the used concepts. The application allows users to browse through the latent concepts in an intuitive order, letting them efficiently scan through the most salient concepts with a global corpus-level view and a local sentence-level view. Our tool is useful for debugging, unraveling model bias, and for highlighting spurious correlations in a model. A hosted demo is available here: https://nxplain.qcri.org