ASOS at NADI 2024 shared task: Bridging Dialectness Estimation and MSA Machine Translation for Arabic Language Enhancement

Omer Nacar, Serry Sibaee, Abdullah Alharbi, Lahouari Ghouti, Anis Koubaa


Abstract
This study undertakes a comprehensive investigation of transformer-based models to advance Arabic language processing, focusing on two pivotal aspects: the estimation of Arabic Level of Dialectness and dialectal sentence-level machine translation into Modern Standard Arabic. We conducted various evaluations of different sentence transformers across a proposed regression model, showing that the MARBERT transformer-based proposed regression model achieved the best root mean square error of 0.1403 for Arabic Level of Dialectness estimation. In parallel, we developed bi-directional translation models between Modern Standard Arabic and four specific Arabic dialects—Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, and Palestinian—by fine-tuning and evaluating different sequence-to-sequence transformers. This approach significantly improved translation quality, achieving a BLEU score of 0.1713. We also enhanced our evaluation capabilities by integrating MSA predictions from the machine translation model into our Arabic Level of Dialectness estimation framework, forming a comprehensive pipeline that not only demonstrates the effectiveness of our methodologies but also establishes a new benchmark in the deployment of advanced Arabic NLP technologies.
Anthology ID:
2024.arabicnlp-1.83
Volume:
Proceedings of The Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Ramy Eskander, Nadi Tomeh, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Ahmed Abdelali, Samia Touileb, Injy Hamed, Yaser Onaizan, Bashar Alhafni, Wissam Antoun, Salam Khalifa, Hatem Haddad, Imed Zitouni, Badr AlKhamissi, Rawan Almatham, Khalil Mrini
Venues:
ArabicNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
748–753
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.arabicnlp-1.83
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.arabicnlp-1.83
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Omer Nacar, Serry Sibaee, Abdullah Alharbi, Lahouari Ghouti, and Anis Koubaa. 2024. ASOS at NADI 2024 shared task: Bridging Dialectness Estimation and MSA Machine Translation for Arabic Language Enhancement. In Proceedings of The Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference, pages 748–753, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ASOS at NADI 2024 shared task: Bridging Dialectness Estimation and MSA Machine Translation for Arabic Language Enhancement (Nacar et al., ArabicNLP-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.arabicnlp-1.83.pdf