Rosetta at AlexandriaX-2026: LoRA-Adapted NileChat for Context-Aware Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation

Nada Esmaeil, Fathima Rena, Sibi Subhash, Osama Elgendy, Mina Fady Gergis Fahmy Naguib, Salma Yehia Ali Ahmed Omar, Muhammad Arif


Abstract
This paper describes the Rosetta system for Subtask 1 (Context-Aware English-to-Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation) of the AlexandriaX shared task, participating in both constrained and unconstrained tracks. The approach fine-tunes a LoRA adapter on NileChat-3B using structured system/user prompts that condition generation on dialect and dialogue context. For the unconstrained track, the adapter is additionally pretrained on MADAR and PADIC. Rosetta ranked 4th in the constrained track (spBLEU 26.10) and 5th in the unconstrained track (spBLEU 25.09). The experimental results demonstrate that external pretraining helps only two of thirteen dialects while slightly hurting overall performance, suggesting negative transfer.
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.99
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:
793–799
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.99/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nada Esmaeil, Fathima Rena, Sibi Subhash, Osama Elgendy, Mina Fady Gergis Fahmy Naguib, Salma Yehia Ali Ahmed Omar, and Muhammad Arif. 2026. Rosetta at AlexandriaX-2026: LoRA-Adapted NileChat for Context-Aware Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation. In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 793–799, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Rosetta at AlexandriaX-2026: LoRA-Adapted NileChat for Context-Aware Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation (Esmaeil et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.99.pdf