We present the results of Shared Task “Dialect to MSA Translation”, which tackles challenges posed by the diverse Arabic dialects in machine translation. Covering Gulf, Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi and Maghrebi dialects, the task offers 1001 sentences in both MSA and dialects for fine-tuning, alongside 1888 blind test sentences. Leveraging GPT-3.5, a state-of-the-art language model, our method achieved the a BLEU score of 29.61. This endeavor holds significant implications for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems targeting low-resource langu ages with linguistic variation. Additionally, negative experiments involving fine-tuning AraT5 and No Language Left Behind (NLLB) using the MADAR Dataset resulted in BLEU scores of 10.41 and 11.96, respectively. Future directions include expanding the dataset to incorporate more Arabic dialects and exploring alternative NMT architectures to further enhance translation capabilities.

Code-switching in speech, particularly between languages that use different scripts, can potentially be correctly transcribed in various forms, including different ways of transliteration of the embedded language into the matrix language script. Traditional methods for measuring accuracy, such as Word Error Rate (WER), are too strict to address this challenge. In this paper, we introduce PolyWER, a proposed framework for evaluating speech recognition systems to handle language-mixing. PolyWER accepts transcriptions of code-mixed segments in different forms, including transliterations and translations. We demonstrate the algorithms use cases through detailed examples, and evaluate it against human judgement. To enable the use of this metric, we appended the annotations of a publicly available Arabic-English code-switched dataset with transliterations and translations of code-mixed speech. We also utilize these additional annotations for fine-tuning ASR models and compare their performance using PolyWER. In addition to our main finding on PolyWER’s effectiveness, our experiments show that alternative annotations could be more effective for fine-tuning monolingual ASR models.