alkhder at AlexandriaX-2026: Context-Aware English-to-Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation with QLoRA-Fine-Tuned NileChat-3B

Hasan Alkhder, Maher Pasa, Maria Hanini, Amro Najjar, Ahmet Zengin


Abstract
This paper describes team Alkhder’s submission to Subtask 1 of the AlexandriaX-2026 shared task, which asks systems to translate English dialogue turns into thirteen Arabic dialects. We fine-tune NileChat-3B-Base with QLoRA on the Alexandria parallel dialogue corpus, training one set of adapter weights for all dialects. Each turn is translated conditioned on the target country and dialect, the domain, the participant roles, the speaker–addressee gender direction, and the preceding dialogue context. At inference, conversations are translated autoregressively and the model is fed its own previous outputs back as context without using any gold target-side test information. Under the constrained-track, using only Alexandria data, it trains in about one hour and translates the private test set in under two hours. The system reaches a country-macro-averaged spBLEU of 20.36 and chrF++ of 36.64, on both tracks.
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.108
Volume:
Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Tamer Elsayed, Houda Bouamor, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Hend Al-Khalifa, Ahmed Abdelali, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Abdellah El Mekki, Kareem Darwish, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Hamzah Luqman, Salam Khalifa, Samar Magdy, Zaid Alyafeai, Injy Hamed, Wajdi Zaghouani, Imed Zitouni
Venue:
ArabicNLP
SIG:
SIGARAB
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
864–871
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.108/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hasan Alkhder, Maher Pasa, Maria Hanini, Amro Najjar, and Ahmet Zengin. 2026. alkhder at AlexandriaX-2026: Context-Aware English-to-Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation with QLoRA-Fine-Tuned NileChat-3B. In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 864–871, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
alkhder at AlexandriaX-2026: Context-Aware English-to-Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation with QLoRA-Fine-Tuned NileChat-3B (Alkhder et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.108.pdf