Abdellah El Mekki


2024

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Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition
Bashar Talafha | Karima Kadaoui | Samar Mohamed Magdy | Mariem Habiboullah | Chafei Mohamed Chafei | Ahmed Oumar El-Shangiti | Hiba Zayed | Mohamedou Cheikh Tourad | Rahaf Alhamouri | Rwaa Assi | Aisha Alraeesi | Hour Mohamed | Fakhraddin Alwajih | Abdelrahman Mohamed | Abdellah El Mekki | El Moatez Billah Nagoudi | Benelhadj Djelloul Mama Saadia | Hamzah A. Alsayadi | Walid Al-Dhabyani | Sara Shatnawi | Yasir Ech-chammakhy | Amal Makouar | Yousra Berrachedi | Mustafa Jarrar | Shady Shehata | Ismail Berrada | Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In spite of the recent progress in speech processing, the majority of world languages and dialects remain uncovered. This situation only furthers an already wide technological divide, thereby hindering technological and socioeconomic inclusion. This challenge is largely due to the absence of datasets that can empower diverse speech systems. In this paper, we seek to mitigate this obstacle for a number of Arabic dialects by presenting Casablanca, a large-scale community-driven effort to collect and transcribe a multi-dialectal Arabic dataset. The dataset covers eight dialects: Algerian, Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, and Yemeni, and includes annotations for transcription, gender, dialect, and code-switching. We also develop a number of strong baselines exploiting Casablanca. The project page for Casablanca is accessible at: www.dlnlp.ai/speech/casablanca.

2023

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ProMap: Effective Bilingual Lexicon Induction via Language Model Prompting
Abdellah El Mekki | Muhammad Abdul-Mageed | ElMoatez Billah Nagoudi | Ismail Berrada | Ahmed Khoumsi
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2022

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CS-UM6P at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Transformer-based Models for Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic
Abdelkader El Mahdaouy | Abdellah El Mekki | Kabil Essefar | Abderrahman Skiredj | Ismail Berrada
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

Sarcasm is a form of figurative language where the intended meaning of a sentence differs from its literal meaning. This poses a serious challenge to several Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and Author Profiling. In this paper, we present our participating system to the intended sarcasm detection task in English and Arabic languages. Our system consists of three deep learning-based models leveraging two existing pre-trained language models for Arabic and English. We have participated in all sub-tasks. Our official submissions achieve the best performance on sub-task A for Arabic language and rank second in sub-task B. For sub-task C, our system is ranked 7th and 11th on Arabic and English datasets, respectively.

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UM6P-CS at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Enhancing Multilingual and Code-Mixed Complex Named Entity Recognition via Pseudo Labels using Multilingual Transformer
Abdellah El Mekki | Abdelkader El Mahdaouy | Mohammed Akallouch | Ismail Berrada | Ahmed Khoumsi
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

Building real-world complex Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems is a challenging task. This is due to the complexity and ambiguity of named entities that appear in various contexts such as short input sentences, emerging entities, and complex entities. Besides, real-world queries are mostly malformed, as they can be code-mixed or multilingual, among other scenarios. In this paper, we introduce our submitted system to the Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER) shared task. We approach the complex NER for multilingual and code-mixed queries, by relying on the contextualized representation provided by the multilingual Transformer XLM-RoBERTa. In addition to the CRF-based token classification layer, we incorporate a span classification loss to recognize named entities spans. Furthermore, we use a self-training mechanism to generate weakly-annotated data from a large unlabeled dataset. Our proposed system is ranked 6th and 8th in the multilingual and code-mixed MultiCoNER’s tracks respectively.

2021

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CS-UM6P at SemEval-2021 Task 1: A Deep Learning Model-based Pre-trained Transformer Encoder for Lexical Complexity
Nabil El Mamoun | Abdelkader El Mahdaouy | Abdellah El Mekki | Kabil Essefar | Ismail Berrada
Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)

Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP) involves assigning a difficulty score to a particular word or expression, in a text intended for a target audience. In this paper, we introduce a new deep learning-based system for this challenging task. The proposed system consists of a deep learning model, based on pre-trained transformer encoder, for word and Multi-Word Expression (MWE) complexity prediction. First, on top of the encoder’s contextualized word embedding, our model employs an attention layer on the input context and the complex word or MWE. Then, the attention output is concatenated with the pooled output of the encoder and passed to a regression module. We investigate both single-task and joint training on both Sub-Tasks data using multiple pre-trained transformer-based encoders. The obtained results are very promising and show the effectiveness of fine-tuning pre-trained transformers for LCP task.

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CS-UM6P at SemEval-2021 Task 7: Deep Multi-Task Learning Model for Detecting and Rating Humor and Offense
Kabil Essefar | Abdellah El Mekki | Abdelkader El Mahdaouy | Nabil El Mamoun | Ismail Berrada
Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)

Humor detection has become a topic of interest for several research teams, especially those involved in socio-psychological studies, with the aim to detect the humor and the temper of a targeted population (e.g. a community, a city, a country, the employees of a given company). Most of the existing studies have formulated the humor detection problem as a binary classification task, whereas it revolves around learning the sense of humor by evaluating its different degrees. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep Multi-Task Learning (MTL) model to detect and rate humor and offense. It consists of a pre-trained transformer encoder and task-specific attention layers. The model is trained using MTL uncertainty loss weighting to adaptively combine all sub-tasks objective functions. Our MTL model tackles all sub-tasks of the SemEval-2021 Task-7 in one end-to-end deep learning system and shows very promising results.

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Domain Adaptation for Arabic Cross-Domain and Cross-Dialect Sentiment Analysis from Contextualized Word Embedding
Abdellah El Mekki | Abdelkader El Mahdaouy | Ismail Berrada | Ahmed Khoumsi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Finetuning deep pre-trained language models has shown state-of-the-art performances on a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Nevertheless, their generalization performance drops under domain shift. In the case of Arabic language, diglossia makes building and annotating corpora for each dialect and/or domain a more challenging task. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation tackles this issue by transferring the learned knowledge from labeled source domain data to unlabeled target domain data. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised domain adaptation method for Arabic cross-domain and cross-dialect sentiment analysis from Contextualized Word Embedding. Several experiments are performed adopting the coarse-grained and the fine-grained taxonomies of Arabic dialects. The obtained results show that our method yields very promising results and outperforms several domain adaptation methods for most of the evaluated datasets. On average, our method increases the performance by an improvement rate of 20.8% over the zero-shot transfer learning from BERT.

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BERT-based Multi-Task Model for Country and Province Level MSA and Dialectal Arabic Identification
Abdellah El Mekki | Abdelkader El Mahdaouy | Kabil Essefar | Nabil El Mamoun | Ismail Berrada | Ahmed Khoumsi
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

Dialect and standard language identification are crucial tasks for many Arabic natural language processing applications. In this paper, we present our deep learning-based system, submitted to the second NADI shared task for country-level and province-level identification of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA). The system is based on an end-to-end deep Multi-Task Learning (MTL) model to tackle both country-level and province-level MSA/DA identification. The latter MTL model consists of a shared Bidirectional Encoder Representation Transformers (BERT) encoder, two task-specific attention layers, and two classifiers. Our key idea is to leverage both the task-discriminative and the inter-task shared features for country and province MSA/DA identification. The obtained results show that our MTL model outperforms single-task models on most subtasks.

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Deep Multi-Task Model for Sarcasm Detection and Sentiment Analysis in Arabic Language
Abdelkader El Mahdaouy | Abdellah El Mekki | Kabil Essefar | Nabil El Mamoun | Ismail Berrada | Ahmed Khoumsi
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

The prominence of figurative language devices, such as sarcasm and irony, poses serious challenges for Arabic Sentiment Analysis (SA). While previous research works tackle SA and sarcasm detection separately, this paper introduces an end-to-end deep Multi-Task Learning (MTL) model, allowing knowledge interaction between the two tasks. Our MTL model’s architecture consists of a Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) model, a multi-task attention interaction module, and two task classifiers. The overall obtained results show that our proposed model outperforms its single-task and MTL counterparts on both sarcasm and sentiment detection subtasks.

2020

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Weighted combination of BERT and N-GRAM features for Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification
Abdellah El Mekki | Ahmed Alami | Hamza Alami | Ahmed Khoumsi | Ismail Berrada
Proceedings of the Fifth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

Around the Arab world, different Arabic dialects are spoken by more than 300M persons, and are increasingly popular in social media texts. However, Arabic dialects are considered to be low-resource languages, limiting the development of machine-learning based systems for these dialects. In this paper, we investigate the Arabic dialect identification task, from two perspectives: country-level dialect identification from 21 Arab countries, and province-level dialect identification from 100 provinces. We introduce an unified pipeline of state-of-the-art models, that can handle the two subtasks. Our experimental studies applied to the NADI shared task, show promising results both at the country-level (F1-score of 25.99%) and the province-level (F1-score of 6.39%), and thus allow us to be ranked 2nd for the country-level subtask, and 1st in the province-level subtask.