# Revisiting Pre-trained Language Models and their Evaluation for Arabic Natural Language Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10687 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10687/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (2018)
- [Analyzing Multi-Head Self-Attention: Specialized Heads Do the Heavy Lifting, the Rest Can Be Pruned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09418/) (2019)
- [ERASER: A Benchmark to Evaluate Rationalized NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03429/) (2019)
- [Datasets: A Community Library for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02846/) (2021)
- [Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing via Large Pre-Trained Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01243/) (2021)
- [Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14337/) (2021)
- [CamemBERT: a Tasty French Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03894/) (2019)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09223/) (2019)
- [Horovod: fast and easy distributed deep learning in TensorFlow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05799/) (2018)
- [CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05986/) (2020)
- [ERNIE 3.0: Large-scale Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02137/) (2021)
- [CANINE: Pre-training an Efficient Tokenization-Free Encoder for Language Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06874/) (2021)
- [ERNIE 2.0: A Continual Pre-training Framework for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12412/) (2019)
- [Named Entity Recognition with Bidirectional LSTM-CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08308/) (2015)
- [ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01785/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Evaluation Metrics Used for NLG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12009/) (2020)
- [WikiLingua: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03093/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Survey on Arabic Named Entity Recognition: Past, Recent Advances, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03512/) (2023)
- [Arabic Stable LM: Adapting Stable LM 2 1.6B to Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04277/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There is a growing body of work in recent years to develop pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the Arabic language. This work concerns addressing two major problems in existing Arabic PLMs which constraint progress of the Arabic NLU and NLG fields.First, existing Arabic PLMs are not well-explored and their pre-trainig can be improved significantly using a more methodical approach. Second, there is a lack of systematic and reproducible evaluation of these models in the literature. In this work, we revisit both the pre-training and evaluation of Arabic PLMs. In terms of pre-training, we explore improving Arabic LMs from three perspectives: quality of the pre-training data, size of the model, and incorporating character-level information. As a result, we release three new Arabic BERT-style models ( JABER, Char-JABER, and SABER), and two T5-style models (AT5S and AT5B). In terms of evaluation, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study to systematically evaluate the performance of existing state-of-the-art models on ALUE that is a leaderboard-powered benchmark for Arabic NLU tasks, and on a subset of the ARGEN benchmark for Arabic NLG tasks. We show that our models significantly outperform existing Arabic PLMs and achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on discriminative and generative Arabic NLU and NLG tasks. Our models and source code to reproduce of results will be made available shortly.