CIDAR: Culturally Relevant Instruction Dataset For Arabic

Zaid Alyafeai, Khalid Almubarak, Ahmed Ashraf, Deema Alnuhait, Saied Alshahrani, Gubran Abdulrahman, Gamil Ahmed, Qais Gawah, Zead Saleh, Mustafa Ghaleb, Yousef Ali, Maged Al-shaibani


Abstract
Instruction tuning has emerged as a prominent methodology for teaching Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions. However, current instruction datasets predominantly cater to English or are derived from English-dominated LLMs, leading to inherent biases toward Western culture. This bias negatively impacts non-English languages such as Arabic and the unique culture of the Arab region. This paper addresses this limitation by introducing CIDAR, the first open Arabic instruction-tuning dataset culturally aligned by native Arabic speakers. CIDAR contains 10,000 instruction and output pairs that represent the Arab region. We discuss the cultural relevance of CIDAR via the analysis and comparison to a few models fine-tuned on other datasets. Our experiments indicate that models fine-tuned on CIDAR achieve better cultural alignment compared to those fine-tuned on 30x more data.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.764
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12878–12901
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.764
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.764
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zaid Alyafeai, Khalid Almubarak, Ahmed Ashraf, Deema Alnuhait, Saied Alshahrani, Gubran Abdulrahman, Gamil Ahmed, Qais Gawah, Zead Saleh, Mustafa Ghaleb, Yousef Ali, and Maged Al-shaibani. 2024. CIDAR: Culturally Relevant Instruction Dataset For Arabic. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 12878–12901, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CIDAR: Culturally Relevant Instruction Dataset For Arabic (Alyafeai et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.764.pdf