Khaled Essam


2021

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Adapting MARBERT for Improved Arabic Dialect Identification: Submission to the NADI 2021 Shared Task
Badr AlKhamissi | Mohamed Gabr | Muhammad ElNokrashy | Khaled Essam
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

In this paper, we tackle the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2021) and demonstrate state-of-the-art results on all of its four subtasks. Tasks are to identify the geographic origin of short Dialectal (DA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) utterances at the levels of both country and province. Our final model is an ensemble of variants built on top of MARBERT that achieves an F1-score of 34.03% for DA at the country-level development set—an improvement of 7.63% from previous work.

2019

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Morphology-aware Word-Segmentation in Dialectal Arabic Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation
Ahmed Tawfik | Mahitab Emam | Khaled Essam | Robert Nabil | Hany Hassan
Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

Parallel corpora available for building machine translation (MT) models for dialectal Arabic (DA) are rather limited. The scarcity of resources has prompted the use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) abundant resources to complement the limited dialectal resource. However, dialectal clitics often differ between MSA and DA. This paper compares morphology-aware DA word segmentation to other word segmentation approaches like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) and Sub-word Regularization (SR). A set of experiments conducted on Egyptian Arabic (EA), Levantine Arabic (LA), and Gulf Arabic (GA) show that a sufficiently accurate morphology-aware segmentation used in conjunction with BPE outperforms the other word segmentation approaches.