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Instruction-Guided Poetry Generation in Arabic and Its Dialects

About

Poetry has long been a central art form for Arabic speakers, serving as a powerful medium of expression and cultural identity. While modern Arabic speakers continue to value poetry, existing research on Arabic poetry within Large Language Models (LLMs) has primarily focused on analysis tasks such as interpretation or metadata prediction, e.g., rhyme schemes and titles. In contrast, our work addresses the practical aspect of poetry creation in Arabic by introducing controllable generation capabilities to assist users in writing poetry. Specifically, we present a large-scale, carefully curated instruction-based dataset in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and various Arabic dialects. This dataset enables tasks such as writing, revising, and continuing poems based on predefined criteria, including style and rhyme, as well as performing poetry analysis. Our experiments show that fine-tuning LLMs on this dataset yields models that can effectively generate poetry that is aligned with user requirements, based on both automated metrics and human evaluation with native Arabic speakers. The data and the code are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/instructpoet-ar

Abdelrahman Sadallah, Kareem Elozeiri, Mervat Abassy, Rania Elbadry, Mohamed Anwar, Abed Alhakim Freihat, Preslav Nakov, Fajri Koto• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
ContinuationArabic Creative Writing Evaluation Dataset (test)
BERT-Score86.9
12
GenerationArabic Creative Writing Evaluation Dataset (test)
BERT-Score81.6
12
Poetry AnalysisArabic Poetry Analysis
Analysis Accuracy79
12
Poetry ContinuationArabic Dialectal Poetry MSA
LLM-as-a-Judge Score2.06
12
Poetry ContinuationArabic Dialectal Poetry Gulf
LLM-as-a-Judge Score2.01
12
Poetry ContinuationArabic Dialectal Poetry North Africa
LLM-as-a-Judge Score2.03
12
Poetry ContinuationArabic Dialectal Poetry Levant
LLM-as-a-Judge Score2
12
Poetry ContinuationArabic Dialectal Poetry Nile Valley
LLM-as-a-Judge Score1.98
12
Poetry GenerationArabic Dialectal Poetry MSA
LLM Judge Score2.44
12
Poetry GenerationArabic Dialectal Poetry Gulf
LLM-Judge Score2.72
12
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