Arabic harmful-language detection has received considerable attention, yet Arabic text detoxification remains underexplored. We introduce AraDetox, a multi-dialect Arabic detoxification dataset comprising 10,500 harmful social-media posts and 84,000 detoxified rewrites generated using GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash across Modern Standard Arabic, Gulf, Levantine, and Egyptian Arabic. The generated outputs were assessed through human evaluation and automatic analyses of lexical change, semantic preservation, sentiment, and dialectal style. Results show that detoxification is primarily a meaning-preserving rewriting task: substantial lexical and structural reformulation is accompanied by consistently high semantic similarity. Human evaluation confirms successful harmful-language removal while largely preserving the original meaning. Dialectal analyses further indicate that the generated variants exhibit measurable stylistic alignment with reference Arabic dialect corpora. Comparison with existing resources highlights two complementary approaches to detoxification: minimal-edit lexical substitution and meaning-preserving reformulation. Our findings demonstrate that large-scale Arabic detoxification resources can be constructed through LLM-assisted generation and human verification. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/ArabicNLP-UK/AraDetox to support future research on Arabic detoxification, safe text generation, and multi-dialect Arabic NLP.
Sara Yakoubi, Ikram Khalfallah, Kenza Khelkhal +1cs.CL
The widespread adoption of social media platforms has transformed online communication by enabling users to exchange information and opinions instantly. However, these platforms have also facilitated the dissemination of abusive and hateful content, posing major social, psychological, and ethical challenges. Hate speech can incite discrimination, harassment, and violence against individuals or communities based on attributes such as ethnicity, religion, gender, nationality, or political affiliation. Consequently, automatic hate speech detection has become a major research topic in natural language processing (NLP) and an essential component of content moderation systems. This paper investigates automatic hate speech detection in the Algerian Arabic dialect (Darija) on social media. This task remains challenging because of the dialect's linguistic diversity, characterized by the coexistence of Arabic, French, and Arabizi (Arabic written using the Latin alphabet). We compare four categories of text classification approaches: (1) traditional machine learning models using TF-IDF features, (2) deep learning models based on recurrent neural networks, (3) Transformer-based language models, including DziriBERT and multilingual BERT, and (4) a novel hybrid architecture, FAD-SA-GRU, which combines semantic representations from DZ FastText, DZ AraVec, and DziriBERT through multi-embedding fusion, followed by a self-attention-enhanced GRU encoder. Experiments on an annotated dataset of Algerian Darija social media comments for binary hate speech classification show that FAD-SA-GRU outperforms all baselines, achieving 93.2% accuracy, 93.4% precision, 91.0% recall, 92.1% F1-score, and 97.0% ROC-AUC. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining complementary embedding representations with attention-based sequence modeling for robust hate speech detection in low-resource dialectal Arabic.