Shaer: Controlled Arabic Poetry Generation with Meter Subform and Semantic Conditioning

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

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in creative text generation, yet their ability to produce culturally grounded and stylistically constrained literary forms remains underexplored. Prior work has focused largely on modern language varieties and poetry, while classical prose traditions such as maqama remain largely unstudied. The maqama is a classical literary genre characterized by rhymed prose (saj), dense rhetorical ornamentation, and episodic narrative structure, making it a challenging testbed for evaluating whether LLMs can move beyond surface fluency toward deeper literary competence. In this paper, we present the first controlled evaluation study of maqama generation with LLMs, comparing five models under zero-shot, few-shot, and rule-based prompting, and evaluating outputs through both human annotation and an LLM-as-a-judge framework across dimensions such as rhetorical richness, saj density, structural coherence, and stylistic authenticity. Our results show that prompting strategy plays a strong role in stylistic quality: few-shot prompting most consistently improves saj density, while its effects on rhetoric and coherence vary by model, with the strongest models (GPT-4o and GPT-5.4-mini) benefiting most from rule-based prompting on these dimensions, though zero-shot prompting yields the highest aggregate scores across all five models. We further observe systematic differences between models in stylistic alignment with Arabic maqama conventions, and corroborate our findings with a second independent LLM judge, paired statistical significance testing, and non-LLM proxy measures of saj.

Arabic morphology remains challenging for large language models, since fluent generation does not guarantee accurate morphosyntactic control. Existing Arabic evaluations mainly target downstream tasks and do not directly test controlled morphological generation from explicit lexical and feature-based input. We introduce YallaMorph, a large-scale benchmark for Arabic morphological generation covering verbs, nouns, adjectives, their cliticized forms, and invalid configurations. We evaluate multilingual and Arabic-oriented LLMs under diacritized and undiacritized settings over 600K benchmark entries. Results show that Arabic morphological generation remains difficult, especially for cliticized, unseen, and morphologically rare forms.