Papers › AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding

AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding

28 Feb 2020LREC 2020 5arXiv:2003.00104archive 2025-07-28

Wissam Antoun, Fady Baly, Hazem Hajj

The Arabic language is a morphologically rich language with relatively few resources and a less explored syntax compared to English. Given these limitations, Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks like Sentiment Analysis (SA), Named Entity Recognition (NER), and Question Answering (QA), have proven to be very challenging to tackle. Recently, with the surge of transformers based models, language-specific BERT based models have proven to be very efficient at language understanding, provided they are pre-trained on a very large corpus. Such models were able to set new standards and achieve state-of-the-art results for most NLP tasks. In this paper, we pre-trained BERT specifically for the Arabic language in the pursuit of achieving the same success that BERT did for the English language. The performance of AraBERT is compared to multilingual BERT from Google and other state-of-the-art approaches. The results showed that the newly developed AraBERT achieved state-of-the-art performance on most tested Arabic NLP tasks. The pretrained araBERT models are publicly available on https://github.com/aub-mind/arabert hoping to encourage research and applications for Arabic NLP.

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Code

aub-mind/araBERT officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report
msfasha/Arabic-NLP mentioned on GitHubtfnot reachable when probed 2026-09-17 — repositories for recent papers often appear after camera-ready report

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Tasks

NERNamed Entity RecognitionNamed Entity Recognition (NER)Question AnsweringSentiment AnalysisVoice Conversionmodelnamed-entity-recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Sentiment Analysis AJGT AraBERTv1 Accuracy 93.8 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis HARD AraBERTv1 Accuracy 96.1 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis LABR (2-class, unbalanced) AraBERTv1 Accuracy 86.7 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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