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This paper presents an overview of the Arabic Natural Language Understanding (ArabicNLU 2024) shared task, focusing on two subtasks: Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and Location Mention Disambiguation (LMD). The task aimed to evaluate the ability of automated systems to resolve word ambiguity and identify locations mentioned in Arabic text. We provided participants with novel datasets, including a sense-annotated corpus for WSD, called SALMA with approximately $34$k annotated tokens, and the idda{} dataset with $3,893$ annotations and $763$ unique location mentions. These are challenging tasks. Out of the $38$ registered teams, only three teams participated in the final evaluation phase, with the highest accuracy being $77.8%$ for WSD and $95.0%$ for LMD. The shared task not only facilitated the evaluation and comparison of different techniques, but also provided valuable insights and resources for the continued advancement of Arabic NLU technologies.

ACL 2024

ArabicNLU 2024: The First Arabic Natural Language Understanding Shared Task

arabic natural language understanding

location mention disambiguation

word sense disambiguation

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workshop paper

This paper presents a novel approach to Ara- bic Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) lever- aging transformer-based models to tackle the complexities of the Arabic language. Utiliz- ing the SALMA dataset, we applied several techniques, including Sentence Transformers with Siamese networks and the SetFit frame- work optimized for few-shot learning. Our ex- periments, structured around a robust evalua- tion framework, achieved a promising F1-score of up to 71%, securing second place in the ArabicNLU 2024: The First Arabic Natural Language Understanding Shared Task compe- tition. These results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, especially in dealing with the challenges posed by homophones, homographs, and the lack of diacritics in Arabic texts. The proposed methods significantly outperformed traditional WSD techniques, highlighting their potential to enhance the accuracy of Arabic natural language processing applications.

Pirates at ArabicNLU2024: Enhancing Arabic Word Sense Disambiguation using Transformer-Based Approaches

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.

rematchka at ArabicNLU2024: Evaluating Large Language Models for Arabic Word Sense and Location Sense Disambiguation

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.

AraFinNLP 2024: The First Arabic Financial NLP Shared Task

The recent growth in Middle Eastern stock markets has intensified the demand for specialized financial Arabic NLP models to serve this sector. This article presents the participation of Team SMASH of The University of Edinburgh in the Multi-dialect Intent Detection task (Subtask 1) of the Arabic Financial NLP (AraFinNLP) Shared Task 2024. The dataset used in the shared task is the ArBanking77 (Jarrar et al., 2023). We tackled this task as a classification problem and utilized several BERT and BART-based models to classify the queries efficiently. Our solution is based on implementing a two-step hierarchical classification model based on MARBERTv2. We fine-tuned the model by using the original queries. Our team, SMASH, was ranked 9th with a macro F1 score of 0.7866, indicating areas for further refinement and potential enhancement of the model’s performance.

SMASH at AraFinNLP2024: Benchmarking Arabic BERT Models on the Intent Detection

In the financial industry, identifying user intent from text inputs is crucial for various tasks such as automated trading, sentiment analysis, and customer support. One important component of natural language processing (NLP) is intent detection, which is significant to the finance sector. Limited studies have been conducted in the field of finance using languages with limited resources like Arabic, despite notable works being done in high-resource languages like English. To advance Arabic NLP in the financial domain, the organizer of AraFinNLP 2024 has arranged a shared task for detecting banking intents from the queries in various Arabic dialects, introducing a novel dataset named ArBanking77 which includes a collection of banking queries categorized into 77 distinct intents classes. To accomplish this task, we have presented a hierarchical approach called Dual-Phase-BERT in which the detection of dialects is carried out first, followed by the detection of banking intents. Using the provided ArBanking77 dataset, we have trained and evaluated several conventional machine learning, and deep learning models along with some cutting-edge transformer-based models. Among these models, our proposed Dual-Phase-BERT model has ranked $7^{th}$ out of all competitors, scoring 0.801 on the scale of F1-score on the test set.

Fired_from_NLP at AraFinNLP 2024: Dual-Phase-BERT - A Fine-Tuned Transformer-Based Model for Multi-Dialect Intent Detection in The Financial Domain for The Arabic Language

Arabic banking intent detection represents a challenging problem across multiple dialects. It imposes generalization difficulties due to the scarcity of Arabic language and its dialects resources compared to English. We propose a methodology that leverages contrastive training to overcome this limitation. We also augmented the data with several dialects using a translation model. Our experiments demonstrate the ability of our approach in capturing linguistic nuances across different Arabic dialects as well as accurately differentiating between banking intents across diverse linguistic landscapes. This would enhance multi-dialect banking services in the Arab world with limited Arabic language resources. Using our proposed method we achieved second place on subtask 1 leaderboard of the AraFinNLP2024 shared task with micro-F1 score of 0.8762 on the test split.

AlexuNLP24 at AraFinNLP2024: Multi-Dialect Arabic Intent Detection with Contrastive Learning in Banking Domain

Intention detection is a crucial aspect of natural language understanding (NLU), focusing on identifying the primary objective underlying user input. In this work, we present a transformer-based method that excels in determining the intent of Arabic text within the banking domain. We explored several machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and transformer-based models on an Arabic banking dataset for intent detection. Our findings underscore the challenges that traditional ML and DL models face in understanding the nuances of various Arabic dialects, leading to subpar performance in intent detection. However, the transformer-based methods, designed to tackle such complexities, significantly outperformed the other models in classifying intent across different Arabic dialects. Notably, the AraBERTv2 model achieved the highest micro F1 score of 82.08% in ArBanking77 dataset, a testament to its effectiveness in this context. This achievement, which contributed to our work being ranked 5$^{th}$ in the shared task, AraFinNLP2024, highlights the importance of developing models that can effectively handle the intricacies of Arabic language processing and intent detection.

SemanticCuetSync at AraFinNLP2024: Classification of Cross-Dialect Intent in the Banking Domain using Transformers

We describe our submitted system to the 2024 Shared Task on The Arabic Financial NLP (Malaysha et al., 2024). We tackled Subtask 1, namely Multi-dialect Intent Detection. We used state-of-the-art pretrained contextualized text representation models and fine-tuned them according to the downstream task at hand. We started by finetuning multilingual BERT and various Arabic variants, namely MARBERTV1, MARBERTV2, and CAMeLBERT. Then, we employed an ensembling technique to improve our classification performance combining MARBERTV2 and CAMeLBERT embeddings. The findings indicate that MARBERTV2 surpassed all the other models mentioned.

SENIT at AraFinNLP2024: trust your model or combine two

This paper presents our results for the Arabic Financial NLP (AraFinNLP) shared task at the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2024). We participated in the first sub-task, Multi-dialect Intent Detection, which focused on cross-dialect intent detection in the banking domain. Our approach involved fine-tuning an encoder-only T5 model, generating synthetic data, and model ensembling. Additionally, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the dataset, addressing annotation errors and problematic translations. Our model was ranked third in the shared task, achieving a F1-score of 0.871.

BabelBot at AraFinNLP2024: Fine-tuning T5 for Multi-dialect Intent Detection with Synthetic Data and Model Ensembling

Intent detection, also called intent classification or recognition, is an NLP technique to comprehend the purpose behind user utterances. This paper focuses on Multi-dialect Arabic intent detection in banking, utilizing the ArBanking77 dataset. Our method employs an ensemble of fine-tuned BERT-based models, integrating contrastive loss for training. To enhance generalization to diverse Arabic dialects, we augment the ArBanking77 dataset, originally in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Palestinian, with additional dialects such as Egyptian, Moroccan, and Saudi, among others. Our approach achieved an F1-score of 0.8771, ranking first in subtask-1 of the AraFinNLP shared task 2024.

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Pirates at ArabicNLU2024: Enhancing Arabic Word Sense Disambiguation using Transformer-Based Approaches

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rematchka at ArabicNLU2024: Evaluating Large Language Models for Arabic Word Sense and Location Sense Disambiguation

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