Enhancing Dialectal Arabic Intent Detection through Cross-Dialect Multilingual Input Augmentation

Shehenaz Hossain, Fouad Shammary, Bahaulddin Shammary, Haithem Afli


Abstract
Addressing the challenges of Arabic intent detection amid extensive dialectal variation, this study presents a crossdialtectal, multilingual approach for classifying intents in banking and migration contexts. By augmenting dialectal inputs with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and English translations, our method leverages cross-lingual context to improve classification accuracy. We evaluate single-input (dialect-only), dual-input (dialect + MSA), and triple-input (dialect + MSA + English) models, applying language-specific tokenization for each. Results demonstrate that, in the migration dataset, our model achieved an accuracy gain of over 50% on Tunisian dialect, increasing from 43.3% with dialect-only input to 94% with the full multilingual setup. Similarly, in the PAL (Palestinian dialect) dataset, accuracy improved from 87.7% to 93.5% with translation augmentation, reflecting a gain of 5.8 percentage points. These findings underscore the effectiveness of our approach for intent detection across various Arabic dialects.
Anthology ID:
2025.wacl-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics (WACL-4)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Saad Ezzini, Hamza Alami, Ismail Berrada, Abdessamad Benlahbib, Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Salima Lamsiyah, Hatim Derrouz, Amal Haddad Haddad, Mustafa Jarrar, Mo El-Haj, Ruslan Mitkov, Paul Rayson
Venues:
WACL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
44–49
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.wacl-1.5/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shehenaz Hossain, Fouad Shammary, Bahaulddin Shammary, and Haithem Afli. 2025. Enhancing Dialectal Arabic Intent Detection through Cross-Dialect Multilingual Input Augmentation. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics (WACL-4), pages 44–49, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Dialectal Arabic Intent Detection through Cross-Dialect Multilingual Input Augmentation (Hossain et al., WACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.wacl-1.5.pdf