This paper presents our approach to the Dialect to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Machine Translation shared task, conducted as part of the sixth Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT6). Our primary contribution is the development of a novel dataset derived from The Saudi Audio Dataset for Arabic (SADA) an Arabic audio corpus. By employing an automated method utilizing ChatGPT 3.5, we translated the dialectal Arabic texts to their MSA equivalents. This process not only yielded a unique and valuable dataset but also showcased an efficient method for leveraging language models in dataset generation. Utilizing this dataset, alongside additional resources, we trained a machine translation model based on the Transformer architecture. Through systematic experimentation with model configurations, we achieved notable improvements in translation quality. Our findings highlight the significance of LLM-assisted dataset creation methodologies and their impact on advancing machine translation systems, particularly for languages with considerable dialectal diversity like Arabic.

This paper presents the Dialectal Arabic (DA) to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Machine Translation (MT) shared task in the sixth Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT6). The paper describes the creation of the validation and test data and the metrics used; and provides a brief overview of the submissions to the shared task. In all, 29 teams signed up and 6 teams made actual submissions. The teams used a variety of datasets and approaches to build their MT systems. The most successful submission involved using zero-shot and n-shot prompting of chatGPT.