Post-training has emerged as a crucial technique for aligning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with human instructions, significantly enhancing their performance across a wide range of tasks. Central to this process is the quality and diversity of post-training datasets. This paper presents a review of publicly available Arabic post-training datasets on the Hugging Face Hub, organized along four key dimensions: (1) LLM Capabilities (e.g., Question Answering, Translation, Reasoning, Summarization, Dialogue, Code Generation, and Function Calling); (2) Steerability (e.g., Persona and System Prompts); (3) Alignment (e.g., Cultural, Safety, Ethics, and Fairness); and (4) Robustness. Each dataset is rigorously evaluated based on popularity, practical adoption, recency and maintenance, documentation and annotation quality, licensing transparency, and scientific contribution. Our review revealed critical gaps in the development of Arabic post-training datasets, including limited task diversity, inconsistent or missing documentation and annotation, and low adoption across the community. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of these gaps on the progress of Arabic-centric LLMs and applications while providing concrete recommendations for future efforts in Arabic post-training dataset development.

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 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.

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.