SDNLP at AMIYA 2026: Syrian Arabic Dialect Modeling with LoRA

Hasan Alkhder, Mohammad Abboush


Abstract
Dialectal Arabic continues to represent a persistent challenge for contemporary large language models, which are predominantly trained and optimized for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and therefore exhibit limited capability when processing colloquial varieties. In this study, a dedicated system developed for participation in the AMIYA shared task focusing on Syrian Arabic is presented. The proposed solution is based on the integration of parameter-efficient fine-tuning through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with prompt-guided inference, aiming to enhance dialectal adequacy and linguistic naturalness. Rather than emphasizing strict factual precision, the system is deliberately designed to prioritize fluent and authentic Syrian Arabic generation, in accordance with the evaluation principles adopted by the AL-QASIDA benchmark. This design choice reflects a focus on human-perceived language quality and dialectal fidelity, which are central to effective dialect-aware language modeling.
Anthology ID:
2026.vardial-1.29
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Venues:
VarDial | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
359–364
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.vardial-1.29/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hasan Alkhder and Mohammad Abboush. 2026. SDNLP at AMIYA 2026: Syrian Arabic Dialect Modeling with LoRA. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, pages 359–364, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SDNLP at AMIYA 2026: Syrian Arabic Dialect Modeling with LoRA (Alkhder & Abboush, VarDial 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.vardial-1.29.pdf