Despite Arabic being one of the most widely spoken languages, the development of Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems faces significant challenges due to the language's complexity, and only a limited number of public Arabic ASR models exist. While much of the focus has been on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), there is considerably less attention given to the variations within the language. This paper introduces a universal methodology for Arabic speech and text processing designed to address unique challenges of the language. Using this methodology, we train two novel models based on the FastConformer architecture: one designed specifically for MSA and the other, the first unified public model for both MSA and Classical Arabic (CA). The MSA model sets a new benchmark with state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on related datasets, while the unified model achieves SOTA accuracy with diacritics for CA while maintaining strong performance for MSA. To promote reproducibility, we open-source the models and their training recipes.

The inherent complexities of Arabic script; its cursive nature, diacritical marks (tashkeel), and varied typography, pose persistent challenges for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). We present Qari-OCR, a series of vision-language models derived from Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct, progressively optimized for Arabic through iterative fine-tuning on specialized synthetic datasets. Our leading model, QARI v0.2, establishes a new open-source state-of-the-art with a Word Error Rate (WER) of 0.160, Character Error Rate (CER) of 0.061, and BLEU score of 0.737 on diacritically-rich texts. Qari-OCR demonstrates superior handling of tashkeel, diverse fonts, and document layouts, alongside impressive performance on low-resolution images. Further explorations (QARI v0.3) showcase strong potential for structural document understanding and handwritten text. This work delivers a marked improvement in Arabic OCR accuracy and efficiency, with all models and datasets released to foster further research.

Over the past three years, the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has had a profound impact on multiple areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP) across diverse languages, including Arabic. Although Arabic is considered one of the most widely spoken languages across 27 countries in the Arabic world and used as a second language in some other non-Arabic countries as well, there is still a scarcity of Arabic resources, datasets, and tools. Arabic NLP tasks face various challenges due to the complexities of the Arabic language, including its rich morphology, intricate structure, and diverse writing standards, among other factors. Researchers have been actively addressing these challenges, demonstrating that pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on multilingual corpora achieve significant success in various Arabic NLP tasks. This study provides an overview of using large language models (LLMs) for the Arabic language, highlighting early pre-trained Arabic Language models across various NLP applications and their ability to handle diverse Arabic content tasks and dialects. It also provides an overview of how techniques like finetuning and prompt engineering can enhance the performance of these models. Additionally, the study summarizes common Arabic benchmarks and datasets while presenting our observations on the persistent upward trend in the adoption of LLMs.

Diacritical marks in the Hebrew language give words their vocalized form. The task of adding diacritical marks to plain Hebrew text is still dominated by a system that relies heavily on human-curated resources. Recent models trained on diacritized Hebrew texts still present a gap in performance. We use a recently developed char-based PLM to narrowly bridge this gap. Presenting MenakBERT, a character level transformer pretrained on Hebrew text and fine-tuned to produce diacritical marks for Hebrew sentences. We continue to show how finetuning a model for diacritizing transfers to a task such as part of speech tagging.

While text-based machine learning models that operate on visual inputs of rendered text have become robust against a wide range of existing attacks, we show that they are still vulnerable to visual adversarial examples encoded as text. We use the Unicode functionality of combining diacritical marks to manipulate encoded text so that small visual perturbations appear when the text is rendered. We show how a genetic algorithm can be used to generate visual adversarial examples in a black-box setting, and conduct a user study to establish that the model-fooling adversarial examples do not affect human comprehension. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these attacks in the real world by creating adversarial examples against production models published by Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, and Google.

Diacritics restoration has become a ubiquitous task in the Latin-alphabet-based English-dominated Internet language environment. In this paper, we describe a small footprint 1D dilated convolution-based approach which operates on a character-level. We find that solutions based on 1D dilated convolutional neural networks are competitive alternatives to models based on recursive neural networks or linguistic modeling for the task of diacritics restoration. Our solution surpasses the performance of similarly sized models and is also competitive with larger models. A special feature of our solution is that it even runs locally in a web browser. We also provide a working example of this browser-based implementation. Our model is evaluated on different corpora, with emphasis on the Hungarian language. We performed comparative measurements about the generalization power of the model in relation to three Hungarian corpora. We also analyzed the errors to understand the limitation of corpus-based self-supervised training.