Developer Fine-Tunes Open LLMs to Support Moroccan Arabic Darija and Arabizi

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A developer has released two open-source language models, SILMA-9B-Darija and SILMA-2B-Darija, specifically fine-tuned to handle Moroccan Arabic (Darija) and Arabizi, the Latin-script form of Arabic that uses numbers for certain sounds. The models were trained on a dataset of over 46,000 cleaned Darija instruction and conversation pairs drawn from real Moroccan exchanges and cultural content. Benchmarks run on a 100-question test covering local history, proverbs, and code-switching showed both models outperforming existing Moroccan-dialect alternatives on accuracy and Darija fluency. Unlike standard Arabic models that default to Gulf Arabic or Modern Standard Arabic, the new models retain native Darija vocabulary and handle prompts in both Arabic script and Latin letters. Both models are publicly available on Hugging Face, with the 9B version requiring around 6 GB VRAM and the 2B version running on under 3 GB, making it suitable for consumer devices.

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