Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are integral to many modern natural language processing (NLP) systems. Although multilingual models cover a wide range of languages, they often grapple with challenges like high inference costs and a lack of diverse non-English training data. Arabic-specific PLMs are trained predominantly on modern standard Arabic, which compromises their performance on regional dialects. To tackle this, we construct an Arabic dialectal corpus comprising 3.4M sentences gathered from social media platforms. We utilize this corpus to expand the vocabulary and retrain a BERT-based model from scratch. Named AlcLaM, our model was trained using only 13GB of text, which represents a fraction of the data used by existing models such as CAMeL, MARBERT, and ArBERT, compared to 7.8%%, and 21.3%, respectively. Remarkably, AlcLaM demonstrates superior performance on a variety of Arabic NLP tasks despite the limited training data. AlcLaM is available at: https://github.com/amurtadha/Alclam.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising in-context learning abilities. However, conventional In-Context Learning (ICL) approaches are often impeded by length limitations of transformer architecture, which pose challenges when attempting to effectively integrate supervision from a substantial number of demonstration examples. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, called Naive Bayes-based Context Extension (NBCE), to enable existing LLMs to perform ICL with an increased number of demonstrations by significantly expanding their context size. Importantly, this expansion does not require fine-tuning or dependence on particular model architectures, all the while preserving linear efficiency. NBCE initially splits the context into equal-sized windows fitting the target LLM’s maximum length. Then, it introduces a voting mechanism to select the most relevant window, regarded as the posterior context. Finally, it employs Bayes’ theorem to generate the test task. Our experimental results demonstrate that NBCE substantially enhances performance, particularly as the number of demonstration examples increases, consistently outperforming alternative methods. The NBCE code will be made publicly accessible. The code NBCE is available at: https://github.com/amurtadha/NBCE-master

Semi-supervised text classification-based paradigms (SSTC) typically employ the spirit of self-training. The key idea is to train a deep classifier on limited labeled texts and then iteratively predict the unlabeled texts as their pseudo-labels for further training. However, the performance is largely affected by the accuracy of pseudo-labels, which may not be significant in real-world scenarios. This paper presents a Rank-aware Negative Training (RNT) framework to address SSTC in learning with noisy label settings. To alleviate the noisy information, we adapt a reasoning with uncertainty-based approach to rank the unlabeled texts based on the evidential support received from the labeled texts. Moreover, we propose the use of negative training to train RNT based on the concept that “the input instance does not belong to the complementary label”. A complementary label is randomly selected from all labels except the label on-target. Intuitively, the probability of a true label serving as a complementary label is low and thus provides less noisy information during the training, resulting in better performance on the test data. Finally, we evaluate the proposed solution on various text classification benchmark datasets. Our extensive experiments show that it consistently overcomes the state-of-the-art alternatives in most scenarios and achieves competitive performance in the others. The code of RNT is publicly available on GitHub.