SABER-v0.1 (Saudi Arabic BERT Embeddings for Retrieval) is a state-of-the-art Saudi dialect semantic embedding model, fine-tuned from SA-BERT using MultipleNegativesRankingLoss (MNLR) and Matryoshka Representation Learning over a large, high-quality Saudi Triplet Dataset spanning 21 real-life Saudi domains.
SABER transforms a standard Masked Language Model (MLM) into a powerful semantic encoder capable of capturing deep contextual meaning across Najdi, Hijazi, Gulf-influenced, and mixed Saudi dialectals.
The model achieves state-of-the-art results across both long-paragraph STS evaluation and triplet margin separation, significantly outperforming strong baselines such as ATM2, GATE, LaBSE, mE5-base, MarBERT, and MiniLM.
🏗️ Architecture & Build Pipeline
SABER utilizes a rigorous two-stage optimization pipeline: first, we adapted MARBERT-V2 via Masked Language Modeling (MLM) on 500k Saudi sentences to create the domain-specialized SA-BERT, followed by deep semantic optimization using MultipleNegativesRankingLoss (MNRL) and Matryoshka Representation Learning on curated triplets to produce the final state-of-the-art embedding model.
SABER Training Pipeline
SABER is designed for:
Semantic search
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Clustering
Intent detection
Semantic similarity
Document & paragraph embedding
Ranking and re-ranking systems
Multi-domain Saudi-language applications
This release is v0.1 — the first public version of SABER.
📌 Model Details
Model Name: SABER (Saudi Semantic Embedding)
Version: v0.1
Base Model: SA-BERT-V1 (AraBERT trained on Saudi data)
Saudi dialect NLP remains an underdeveloped space. Most embeddings struggle with dialectal variation, idiomatic expressions, and multi-sentence reasoning. SABER was designed to fill this gap by:
Training specifically on Saudi-dialect triplet data.
Leveraging modern contrastive learning.
Creating robust embeddings suitable for production and research.
This model is the result of extensive evaluation across STS, triplets, and domain-specific tests.
⚠️ Limitations
Regional Scope: Performance may degrade on Levantine, Egyptian, or Maghrebi dialects.
Scope: Embeddings focus on semantic similarity, not syntax or classification.
Input Length: Long multi-document retrieval requires chunking.
Commercial use of this model is not permitted under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
For commercial licensing, partnerships, or enterprise use, please contact:
If you use this model in academic work, please cite:
bibtex
1@inproceedings{nacar-saber-2025,
2 title = "SAUDI ARABIC EMBEDDING MODEL FOR SEMANTIC SIMILARITY AND RETRIEVAL",
3 author = "Nacar, Omer",
4 year = "2025",
5 url = "https://huggingface.co/Omartificial-Intelligence-Space/SA-STS-Embeddings-0.2B",
6}
Sentence Transformers
bibtex
1@inproceedings{reimers-2019-sentence-bert,
2 title = "Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks",
3 author = "Reimers, Nils and Gurevych, Iryna",
4 booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
5 month = "11",
6 year = "2019",
7 publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
8 url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084",
9}
MatryoshkaLoss
bibtex
1@misc{kusupati2024matryoshka,
2 title={Matryoshka Representation Learning},
3 author={Aditya Kusupati and Gantavya Bhatt and Aniket Rege and Matthew Wallingford and Aditya Sinha and Vivek Ramanujan and William Howard-Snyder and Kaifeng Chen and Sham Kakade and Prateek Jain and Ali Farhadi},
4 year={2024},
5 eprint={2205.13147},
6 archivePrefix={arXiv},
7 primaryClass={cs.LG}
8}
MultipleNegativesRankingLoss
bibtex
1@misc{henderson2017efficient,
2 title={Efficient Natural Language Response Suggestion for Smart Reply},
3 author={Matthew Henderson and Rami Al-Rfou and Brian Strope and Yun-hsuan Sung and Laszlo Lukacs and Ruiqi Guo and Sanjiv Kumar and Balint Miklos and Ray Kurzweil},
4 year={2017},
5 eprint={1705.00652},
6 archivePrefix={arXiv},
7 primaryClass={cs.CL}
8}