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.

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.

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.

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.