Saad Ezzini


2025

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Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics (WACL-4)
Saad Ezzini | Hamza Alami | Ismail Berrada | Abdessamad Benlahbib | Abdelkader El Mahdaouy | Salima Lamsiyah | Hatim Derrouz | Amal Haddad Haddad | Mustafa Jarrar | Mo El-Haj | Ruslan Mitkov | Paul Rayson
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics (WACL-4)

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Dialect2SQL: A Novel Text-to-SQL Dataset for Arabic Dialects with a Focus on Moroccan Darija
Salmane Chafik | Saad Ezzini | Ismail Berrada
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics (WACL-4)

The task of converting natural language questions into executable SQL queries, known as text-to-SQL, has gained significant interest in recent years, as it enables non-technical users to interact with relational databases. Many benchmarks, such as SPIDER and WikiSQL, have contributed to the development of new models and the evaluation of their performance. In addition, other datasets, like SEDE and BIRD, have introduced more challenges and complexities to better map real-world scenarios. However, these datasets primarily focus on high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. In this work, we introduce Dialect2SQL, the first large-scale, cross-domain text-to-SQL dataset in an Arabic dialect. It consists of 9,428 NLQ-SQL pairs across 69 databases in various domains. Along with SQL-related challenges such as long schemas, dirty values, and complex queries, our dataset also incorporates the complexities of the Moroccan dialect, which is known for its diverse source lan-guages, numerous borrowed words, and unique expressions. This demonstrates that our dataset will be a valuable contribution to both the text-to-SQL community and the development of resources for low-resource languages.

2024

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AraFinNLP 2024: The First Arabic Financial NLP Shared Task
Sanad Malaysha | Mo El-Haj | Saad Ezzini | Mohammed Khalilia | Mustafa Jarrar | Sultan Almujaiwel | Ismail Berrada | Houda Bouamor
Proceedings of The Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference

The expanding financial markets of the Arab world require sophisticated Arabic NLP tools. To address this need within the banking domain, the Arabic Financial NLP (AraFinNLP) shared task proposes two subtasks: (i) Multi-dialect Intent Detection and (ii) Cross-dialect Translation and Intent Preservation. This shared task uses the updated ArBanking77 dataset, which includes about 39k parallel queries in MSA and four dialects. Each query is labeled with one or more of a common 77 intents in the banking domain. These resources aim to foster the development of robust financial Arabic NLP, particularly in the areas of machine translation and banking chat-bots.A total of 45 unique teams registered for this shared task, with 11 of them actively participated in the test phase. Specifically, 11 teams participated in Subtask 1, while only 1 team participated in Subtask 2. The winning team of Subtask 1 achieved F1 score of 0.8773, and the only team submitted in Subtask 2 achieved a 1.667 BLEU score.

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CodeAgent: Autonomous Communicative Agents for Code Review
Xunzhu Tang | Kisub Kim | Yewei Song | Cedric Lothritz | Bei Li | Saad Ezzini | Haoye Tian | Jacques Klein | Tegawendé F. Bissyandé
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Code review, which aims at ensuring the overall quality and reliability of software, is a cornerstone of software development. Unfortunately, while crucial, Code review is a labor-intensive process that the research community is looking to automate. Existing automated methods rely on single input-output generative models and thus generally struggle to emulate the collaborative nature of code review. This work introduces CodeAgent, a novel multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) system for code review automation. CodeAgent incorporates a supervisory agent, QA-Checker, to ensure that all the agents’ contributions address the initial review question. We evaluated CodeAgent on critical code review tasks: (1) detect inconsistencies between code changes and commit messages, (2) identify vulnerability introductions, (3) validate code style adherence, and (4) suggest code revisions. The results demonstrate CodeAgent’s effectiveness, contributing to a new state-of-the-art in code review automation. Our data and code are publicly available (https://github.com/Daniel4SE/codeagent).

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The Multilingual Corpus of World’s Constitutions (MCWC)
Mo El-Haj | Saad Ezzini
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT) with Shared Tasks on Arabic LLMs Hallucination and Dialect to MSA Machine Translation @ LREC-COLING 2024

The “Multilingual Corpus of World’s Constitutions” (MCWC) serves as a valuable resource for the NLP community, offering a comprehensive collection of constitutions from around the world. Its focus on data quality and breadth of coverage enables advanced research in constitutional analysis, machine translation, and cross-lingual legal studies. The MCWC prepares its data to ensure high quality and minimal noise, while also providing valuable mappings of constitutions to their respective countries and continents, facilitating comparative analysis. Notably, the corpus offers pairwise sentence alignments across languages, supporting machine translation experiments. We utilise a leading Machine Translation model, fine-tuned on the MCWC to achieve accurate and context-aware translations. Additionally, we introduce an independent Machine Translation model as a comparative baseline. Fine-tuning the model on the MCWC improves accuracy, highlighting the significance of such a legal corpus for NLP and Machine Translation. The MCWC’s rich multilingual content and rigorous data quality standards raise the bar for legal text analysis and inspire innovation in the NLP community, opening new avenues for studying constitutional texts and multilingual data analysis.

2023

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Comparing Pre-Training Schemes for Luxembourgish BERT Models
Cedric Lothritz | Saad Ezzini | Christoph Purschke | Tegawendé Bissyandé | Jacques Klein | Isabella Olariu | Andrey Boytsov | Clément LeFebvre | Anne Goujon
Proceedings of the 19th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2023)

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Evaluating the Impact of Text De-Identification on Downstream NLP Tasks
Cedric Lothritz | Bertrand Lebichot | Kevin Allix | Saad Ezzini | Tegawendé Bissyandé | Jacques Klein | Andrey Boytsov | Clément Lefebvre | Anne Goujon
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

Data anonymisation is often required to comply with regulations when transfering information across departments or entities. However, the risk is that this procedure can distort the data and jeopardise the models built on it. Intuitively, the process of training an NLP model on anonymised data may lower the performance of the resulting model when compared to a model trained on non-anonymised data. In this paper, we investigate the impact of de-identification on the performance of nine downstream NLP tasks. We focus on the anonymisation and pseudonymisation of personal names and compare six different anonymisation strategies for two state-of-the-art pre-trained models. Based on these experiments, we formulate recommendations on how the de-identification should be performed to guarantee accurate NLP models. Our results reveal that de-identification does have a negative impact on the performance of NLP models, but this impact is relatively low. We also find that using pseudonymisation techniques involving random names leads to better performance across most tasks.