Meter classification of Arabic poems using deep bidirectional recurrent neural networks.

•Automatic classification of poem meters using deep bidirectional recurrent neural networks.•Avoids the need to diacritize the texts of Arabic poems which is error prone.•Evaluated on a large database of Arabic poems created by the authors for this specific task in order to serve as a benchmark.•Classification rate of 94.32% on an independent test set for 14 poem meters.