Natural Language Understanding (NLU) plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by facilitating semantic interactions. Arabic, with its diverse morphology, poses a challenge as it allows multiple interpretations of words, leading to potential misunderstandings and errors in NLP applications. In this paper, we present our approach for tackling Arabic NLU shared tasks for word sense disambiguation (WSD) and location mention disambiguation (LMD). Various approaches have been investigated from zero-shot inference of large language models (LLMs) to fine-tuning of pre-trained language models (PLMs). The best approach achieved 57% on WSD task ranking third place, while for the LMD task, our best systems achieved 94% MRR@1 ranking first place.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across multiple domains in various natural language tasks. Entailment tasks, however, are more difficult to achieve with a high-performance model. The task is to use safe natural language models to conclude biomedical clinical trial reports (CTRs). The Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Data (NLI4CT) task aims to define a given entailment and hypothesis based on CTRs. This paper aims to address the challenges of medical abbreviations and numerical data that can be logically inferred from one another due to acronyms, using different data pre-processing techniques to explain such data. This paper presents a model for NLI4CT SemEval 2024 task 2 that trains the data with DeBERTa, BioLink, BERT, GPT2, BioGPT, and Clinical BERT using the best training approaches, such as fine-tuning, prompt tuning, and contrastive learning. Furthermore, to validate these models, different experiments have been carried out. Our best system is built on an ensemble of different models with different training settings, which achieves an F1 score of 0.77, a faithfulness score of 0.76, and a consistency score of 0.75 and secures the sixth rank in the official leaderboard. In conclusion, this paper has addressed challenges in medical text analysis by exploring various NLP techniques, evaluating multiple advanced natural languagemodels(NLM) models and achieving good results with the ensemble model. Additionally, this project has contributed to the advancement of safe and effective NLMs for analysing complex medical data in CTRs.

The rise of propaganda and disinformation in the digital age has necessitated the development of effective detection methods to combat the spread of deceptive information. In this paper we present our approach proposed for ArAIEval shared task : propaganda and disinformation detection in Arabic text. Our system utilised different pre-trained BERT based models, that makes use of prompt-learning based on knowledgeable expansion and prefix-tuning. The proposed approach secured third place in subtask-1A with 0.7555 F1-micro score, second place in subtask-1B with 0.5658 F1-micro score. However, for subtask-2A & 2B, the proposed system achieved fourth place with an F1-micro score of 0.9040, 0.8219 respectively. Our findings suggest that prompt-tuning-based & prefix-tuning based models performed better than conventional fine-tuning. Furthermore, using loss aware class imbalance, improved performance.

Dialect identification systems play a significant role in various fields and applications as in speech and language technologies, facilitating language education, supporting sociolinguistic research, preserving linguistic diversity, enhancing text-to-speech systems. In this paper, we provide our findings and results in NADI 2023 shared task for country-level dialect identification and machine translation (MT) from dialect to MSA. The proposed models achieved an F1-score of 86.18 at the dialect identification task, securing second place in first subtask. Whereas for the machine translation task, the submitted model achieved a BLEU score of 11.37 securing fourth and third place in second and third subtask. The proposed model utilizes parameter efficient training methods which achieves better performance when compared to conventional fine-tuning during the experimentation phase.

This paper describes the system used in SemEval-2022 Task 6: Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic. Achieving 20th,3rd places with 34& 47 F1-Sarcastic score for task A, 16th place for task B with 0.0560 F1-macro score, and 10, 6th places for task C with72% and 80% accuracy on the leaderboard. A voting classifier between either multiple different BERT-based models or machine learningmodels is proposed, as our final model. Multiple key points has been extensively examined to overcome the problem of the unbalance ofthe dataset as: type of models, suitable architecture, augmentation, loss function, etc. In addition to that, we present an analysis of ourresults in this work, highlighting its strengths and shortcomings.

Dialect Identification is important to improve the performance of various application as translation, speech recognition, etc. In this paper, we present our findings and results in the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2022) for country-level dialect identification and sentiment identification for dialectical Arabic. The proposed model is an ensemble between fine-tuned BERT-based models and various approaches of prompt-tuning. Our model secured first place on the leaderboard for subtask 1 with an 27.06 F1-macro score, and subtask 2 secured first place with 75.15 F1-PN score. Our findings show that prompt-tuning-based models achieved better performance when compared to fine-tuning and Multi-task based methods. Moreover, using an ensemble of different loss functions might improve model performance.

Irony and Sentiment detection is important to understand people’s behavior and thoughts. Thus it has become a popular task in natural language processing (NLP). This paper presents results and main findings in WANLP 2021 shared tasks one and two. The task was based on the ArSarcasm-v2 dataset (Abu Farha et al., 2021). In this paper, we describe our system Multi-headed-LSTM-CNN-GRU and also MARBERT (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2021) submitted for the shared task, ranked 10 out of 27 in shared task one achieving 0.5662 F1-Sarcasm and ranked 3 out of 22 in shared task two achieving 0.7321 F1-PN under CodaLab username “rematchka”. We experimented with various models and the two best performing models are a Multi-headed CNN-LSTM-GRU in which we used prepossessed text and emoji presented from tweets and MARBERT.