Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of extracting handwritten or printed text from a scanned or printed image and converting it to a machine-readable form for further data processing, such as searching or editing. Automatic text extraction using OCR helps to digitize documents for improved productivity and accessibility and for preservation of historical documents. This paper provides a survey of the current state-of-the-art applications, techniques, and challenges in Arabic OCR. We present the existing methods for each step of the complete OCR process to identify the best-performing approach for improved results. This paper follows the keyword-search method for reviewing the articles related to Arabic OCR, including the backward and forward citations of the article. In addition to state-of-art techniques, this paper identifies research gaps and presents future directions for Arabic OCR.

Arabic handwritten-text recognition applies an OCR technique and then a text-correction technique to extract the text within an image correctly. Deep learning is a current paradigm utilized in OCR techniques. However, no study investigated or critically analyzed recent deep-learning techniques used for Arabic handwritten OCR and text correction during the period of 2020–2023. This analysis fills this noticeable gap in the literature, uncovering recent developments and their limitations for researchers, practitioners, and interested readers. The results reveal that CNN-LSTM-CTC is the most suitable architecture among Transformer and GANs for OCR because it is less complex and can hold long textual dependencies. For OCR text correction, applying DL models to generated errors in datasets improved accuracy in many works. In conclusion, Arabic OCR has the potential to further apply several text-embedding models to correct the resultant text from the OCR, and there is a significant gap in studies investigating this problem. In addition, there is a need for more high-quality and domain-specific OCR Arabic handwritten datasets. Moreover, we recommend the practical development of a space for future trends in Arabic OCR applications, derived from current limitations in Arabic OCR works and from applications in other languages; this will involve a plethora of possibilities that have not been effectively researched at the time of writing.

In the era of global digital communication, understanding user sentiment across multiple languages is a critical challenge with wide-ranging applications in opinion mining, customer feedback analysis, and social media monitoring. This study advances the field of language-independent sentiment analysis by leveraging prompt-based fine-tuning with state-of-the-art transformer models. The performance of classical machine learning approaches, hybrid deep learning architectures, and multilingual transformer models is evaluated across eight typologically diverse languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Baseline models are established using traditional machine learning approaches such as Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Logistic Regression, with feature extraction methods like TF-IDF. A hybrid deep learning model is introduced, combining Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to capture local and sequential text patterns. Building on these, pre-trained multilingual transformer models, specifically BERT-base-multilingual and XLM-RoBERTa, are fine-tuned for language-independent sentiment classification tasks. The key contribution lies in the implementation of prompt-based fine-tuning strategies for language independent sentiment analysis. Using (1) prefix prompts and (2) cloze-style prompts, a unified framework is established that employs templates designed in one language and evaluates their performance on data from the remaining \((n-1)\) languages. Experimental results demonstrate that transformer models, particularly XLM-RoBERTa with prompt-based fine-tuning outperform both classical and deep learning methods. With only 32 training examples per class, prefix prompts produce results comparable to standard fine-tuning, which typically uses 70-80% of the data for training. This highlights the potential of prompt-based learning for scalable, multilingual sentiment analysis in diverse language settings.

Developing Deep Learning Optical Character Recognition is an active area of research, where models based on deep neural networks are trained on data to eventually extract text within an image. Even though many advances are currently being made in this area in general, the Arabic OCR domain notably lacks a dataset for ancient manuscripts. Here, we fill this gap by providing both the image and textual ground truth for a collection of ancient Arabic manuscripts. This scarce dataset is collected from the central library of the Islamic University of Madinah, and it encompasses rich text spanning different geographies across centuries. Specifically, eight ancient books with a total of forty pages, both images and text, transcribed by the experts, are present in this dataset. Particularly, this dataset holds a significant value due to the unavailability of such data publicly, which conspicuously contributes to the deep learning models development/augmenting, validation, testing, and generalization by researchers and practitioners, both for the tasks of Arabic OCR and Arabic text correction.

Automated essay scoring (AES) has become an essential tool in educational assessment. However, applying AES to the Arabic language presents notable challenges, primarily due to the lack of labeled datasets. This data scarcity hampers the development of reliable machine learning models and slows progress in Arabic natural language processing for educational use. While manual annotation by human experts remains the most accurate method for essay evaluation, it is often too costly and time-consuming to create large-scale datasets, especially for low-resource languages like Arabic. In this work, we introduce a human–AI collaborative framework designed to overcome the shortage of scored Arabic essays. Leveraging QAES, a high-quality annotated dataset, our approach uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate multidimensional essay evaluations across seven key writing traits: Relevance, Organization, Vocabulary, Style, Development, Mechanics, and Structure. To ensure accuracy and consistency, we design prompting strategies and validation procedures tailored to each trait. This system is then applied to two unannotated Arabic essay datasets: ZAEBUC and QALB. As a result, we introduce ZaQQ, a newly annotated dataset that merges ZAEBUC, QAES, and QALB. Our findings demonstrate that human–AI collaboration can significantly enhance the availability of labeled resources without compromising assessment quality. The proposed framework serves as a scalable and replicable model for addressing data annotation challenges in low-resource languages and supports the broader goal of expanding access to automated educational assessment tools where expert evaluation is limited.