Arabic Text Formality Modification: A Review and Future Research Directions

Formality transfer seeks to adjust text formality without altering its core meaning, which carries substantial implications across diverse domains like machine translation, dialogue systems, and social media content creation. This study provides an extensive overview of formality transfer specifically within Arabic text, an emerging domain within natural language processing. Particularly, we carried out a comprehensive review of literature on text formality transfer, focusing on studies published between July 2010 and April 2024. Our focus lies in treating formality transfer in Arabic as akin to a machine translation task, presenting synthesized insights. Despite advancements in formality transfer for English and other languages, Arabic’s distinct linguistic features present unique challenges and opportunities. Our investigation uncovers several research gaps necessitating future exploration, emphasizing persistent limitations. Moreover, we delve into text formality transfer as a promising avenue for forthcoming research initiatives in the realm of Arabic text processing.