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.

The use of social media platforms has become more prevalent, which has provided tremendous opportunities for people to connect but has also opened the door for misuse with the spread of hate speech and offensive language. This phenomenon has been driving more and more people to more extreme reactions and online aggression, sometimes causing physical harm to individuals or groups of people. There is a need to control and prevent such misuse of online social media through automatic detection of profane language. The shared task on Offensive Language Detection at the OSACT4 has aimed at achieving state of art profane language detection methods for Arabic social media. Our team “BERTologists” tackled this problem by leveraging state of the art pretrained Arabic language model, AraBERT, that we augment with the addition of Multi-task learning to enable our model to learn efficiently from little data. Our Multitask AraBERT approach achieved the second place in both subtasks A & B, which shows that the model performs consistently across different tasks.