Investigating Code-Mixed Modern Standard Arabic-Egyptian to English Machine Translation

El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed


Abstract
Recent progress in neural machine translation (NMT) has made it possible to translate successfully between monolingual language pairs where large parallel data exist, with pre-trained models improving performance even further. Although there exists work on translating in code-mixed settings (where one of the pairs includes text from two or more languages), it is still unclear what recent success in NMT and language modeling exactly means for translating code-mixed text. We investigate one such context, namely MT from code-mixed Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic (MSAEA) into English. We develop models under different conditions, employing both (i) standard end-to-end sequence-to-sequence (S2S) Transformers trained from scratch and (ii) pre-trained S2S language models (LMs). We are able to acquire reasonable performance using only MSA-EN parallel data with S2S models trained from scratch. We also find LMs fine-tuned on data from various Arabic dialects to help the MSAEA-EN task. Our work is in the context of the Shared Task on Machine Translation in Code-Switching. Our best model achieves 25.72 BLEU, placing us first on the official shared task evaluation for MSAEA-EN.
Anthology ID:
2021.calcs-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Thamar Solorio, Shuguang Chen, Alan W. Black, Mona Diab, Sunayana Sitaram, Victor Soto, Emre Yilmaz, Anirudh Srinivasan
Venue:
CALCS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
56–64
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.calcs-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.calcs-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, AbdelRahim Elmadany, and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed. 2021. Investigating Code-Mixed Modern Standard Arabic-Egyptian to English Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching, pages 56–64, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating Code-Mixed Modern Standard Arabic-Egyptian to English Machine Translation (Nagoudi et al., CALCS 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.calcs-1.8.pdf