# Tarab: A Multi-Dialect Corpus of Arabic Lyrics and Poetry

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16601 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16601/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [Arabic Dialect Identification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06557/) (2020)
- [Arabizi Detection and Conversion to Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.6755/) (2013)
- [AraPoemBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Arabic Poetry Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12392/) (2024)
- [Shamela: A Large-Scale Historical Arabic Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08989/) (2016)

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

- [Benchmarking Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models for Low-Resource Tajik Text Generation with the Tajik Web Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03742/) (2026)
- [AraGenre 2026: A Hierarchical Definition-Guided Arabic Genre Classification Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27387/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce the Tarab Corpus, a large-scale cultural and linguistic resource that brings together Arabic song lyrics and poetry within a unified analytical framework. The corpus comprises 2.56 million verses and more than 13.5 million tokens, making it, to our knowledge, the largest open Arabic corpus of creative text spanning both classical and contemporary production. Tarab is broadly balanced between songs and poems and covers Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and six major regional varieties: Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine, Iraqi, Sudanese, and Maghrebi Arabic. The artists and poets represented in the corpus are associated with 28 modern nation states and multiple historical eras, covering over fourteen centuries of Arabic creative expression from the Pre-Islamic period to the twenty-first century. Each verse is accompanied by structured metadata describing linguistic variety, geographic origin, and historical or cultural context, enabling comparative linguistic, stylistic, and diachronic analysis across genres and time. We describe the data collection, normalisation, and validation pipeline and present baseline analyses for variety identification and genre differentiation. The dataset is publicly available on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/datasets/drelhaj/Tarab.