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We present Team Cher&#39;s submission to the ArabicNLP 2024 KSAA-CAD shared task on the reverse dictionary for Arabic---the retrieval of words using definitions as a query. Our approach is based on a multi-task learning framework that jointly learns reverse dictionary, definition generation, and reconstruction tasks. This work explores different tokenization strategies and compares retrieval performance for each embedding architecture. Evaluation using the KSAA-CAD benchmark demonstrates the effectiveness of our multi-task approach and provides insights into the reverse dictionary task for Arabic. It is worth highlighting that we achieve strong performance without using any external resources in addition to the provided training data.

ACL 2024

Cher at KSAA-CAD 2024: Compressing Words and Definitions into the Same Space for Arabic Reverse Dictionary

arabic language processing

definition modelling

reverse dictionary

representation learning

semantics

We present Team Cher's submission to the ArabicNLP 2024 KSAA-CAD shared task on the reverse dictionary for Arabic---the retrieval of words using definitions as a query. Our approach is based on a multi-task learning framework that jointly learns reverse dictionary, definition generation, and reconstruction tasks. This work explores different tokenization strategies and compares retrieval performance for each embedding architecture. Evaluation using the KSAA-CAD benchmark demonstrates the effectiveness of our multi-task approach and provides insights into the reverse dictionary task for Arabic. It is worth highlighting that we achieve strong performance without using any external resources in addition to the provided training data.

workshop paper

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This research paper presents our approach for the KSAA-CAD 2024 competition, focusing on Arabic Reverse Dictionary (RD) task (Alshammari et al., 2024). Leveraging the functionalities of the Arabic Reverse Dictionary, our system allows users to input glosses and retrieve corresponding words. We provide all associated notebooks and developed models on GitHub and Hugging face, respectively. Our task entails working with a dataset comprising dictionary data and word embedding vectors, utilizing three different architectures of contextualized word embeddings: AraELECTRA, AraBERTv2, and camelBERT-MSA. We fine-tune the AraT5v2-base-1024 model for predicting each embedding, considering various hyperparameters for training and validation. Evaluation metrics include ranking accuracy, mean squared error (MSE), and cosine similarity. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both development and test datasets, showcasing promising performance across different embedding types.

MISSION at KSAA-CAD 2024: AraT5 with Arabic Reverse Dictionary

Semantic search tasks have grown extremely fast following the advancements in large language models, including the Reverse Dictionary and Word Sense Disambiguation in Arabic. This paper describes our participation in the Contemporary Arabic Dictionary Shared Task. We propose two models that achieved first place in both tasks. We conducted comprehensive experiments on the latest five multilingual sentence transformers and the Arabic BERT model for semantic embedding extraction. We achieved a ranking score of 0.06 for the reverse dictionary task, which is double than last year's winner. We had an accuracy score of 0.268 for the Word Sense Disambiguation task.

ASOS at KSAA-CAD 2024: One Embedding is All You Need for Your Dictionary

The domain of reverse dictionaries (RDs), while advancing in languages like English and Chinese, remains underdeveloped for Arabic. This study attempts to explore a data-driven approach to enhance word retrieval processes in Arabic RDs. The research focuses on the ArabicNLP 2024 Shared Task, named KSAA-CAD, which provides a dictionary dataset of 39,214 word-gloss pairs, each with a corresponding target word embedding. The proposed solution aims to surpass the baseline performance by employing SOTA deep learning models and innovative data expansion techniques. The methodology involves enriching the dataset with contextually relevant examples, training a T5 model to align the words to their glosses in the space, and evaluating the results on the shared task metrics. We find that our model is closely aligned with the baseline performance on bertseg and bertmsa targets, however does not perform well on electra target, suggesting the need for further exploration.

Baleegh at KSAA-CAD 2024: Towards Enhancing Arabic Reverse Dictionaries

We describe the findings of the fifth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2024). NADI’s objective is to help advance SoTA Arabic NLP by providing guidance, datasets, modeling opportunities, and standardized evaluation conditions that allow researchers to collaboratively compete on prespecified tasks. NADI 2024 targeted both dialect identification cast as a multi-label task (Subtask 1), identification of the Arabic level of dialectness (Subtask 2), and dialect-to-MSA machine translation (Subtask 3). A total of 51 unique teams registered for the shared task, of whom 12 teams have participated (with 76 valid submissions during the test phase). Among these, three teams participated in Subtask 1, three in Subtask 2, and eight in Subtask 3. The winning teams achieved 50.57 F1 on Subtask 1, 0.1403 RMSE for Subtask 2, and 20.44 BLEU in Subtask 3, respectively. Results show that Arabic dialect processing tasks such as dialect identification and machine translation remain challenging. We describe the methods employed by the participating teams and briefly offer an outlook for NADI.

NADI 2024: The Fifth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task

Navigating the intricacies of machine translation (MT) involves tackling the nuanced disparities between Arabic dialects and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), presenting a formidable obstacle. In this study, we delve into Subtask 3 of the NADI shared task cite{nadi}, focusing on the translation of sentences from four distinct Arabic dialects into MSA. Our investigation explores the efficacy of various models, including Jais, NLLB, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, in this dialect-to-MSA translation endeavor. Our findings reveal that Jais surpasses all other models, boasting an average BLEU score of 19.48 in the combination of zero- and few-shot setting, whereas NLLB exhibits the least favorable performance, garnering a BLEU score of 8.77.

Arabic Train at NADI 2024 shared task: LLMs’ Ability to Translate Arabic Dialects into Modern Standard Arabic

Recognizing the nuanced spectrum of dialectness in Arabic text poses a significant challenge for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Traditional dialect identification (DI) methods treat the task as binary, overlooking the continuum of dialect variation present in Arabic speech and text. In this paper, we describe our submission to the NADI shared Task of ArabicNLP 2024. We participated in Subtask 2 - ALDi Estimation, which focuses on estimating the Arabic Level of Dialectness (ALDi) for Arabic text, indicating how much it deviates from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) on a scale from 0 to 1, where 0 means MSA and 1 means high divergence from MSA. We explore diverse training approaches, including contrastive learning, applying a random weighted sampler along with fine-tuning a regression task based on the AraBERT model, after adding a linear and non-linear layer on top of its pooled output. Finally, performing a brute force ensemble strategy increases the performance of our system. Our proposed solution achieved a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.1406, ranking second on the leaderboard.

AlexUNLP-STM at NADI 2024 shared task: Quantifying the Arabic Dialect Spectrum with Contrastive Learning, Weighted Sampling, and BERT-based Regression Ensemble

We report the approaches submitted to the NADI 2024 Subtask 1: Multi-label country-level Dialect Identification (MLDID). The core part was to adapt the information from multi-class data for a multi-label dialect classification task. We experimented with supervised and unsupervised strategies to tackle the task in this challenging setting. Under the supervised setup, we used the model trained using NADI 2023 data and devised approaches to convert the multi-class predictions to multi-label by using information from the confusion matrix or using calibrated probabilities. Under unsupervised settings, we used the Arabic-based sentence encoders and multilingual cross-encoders to retrieve similar samples from the training set, considering each test input as a query. The associated labels are then assigned to the input query. We also tried different variations, such as co-occurring dialects derived from the provided development set. We obtained the best validation performance of 48.5% F-score using one of the variations with an unsupervised approach and the same approach yielded the best test result of 43.27% (Ranked 2).

NLP_DI at NADI 2024 shared task: Multi-label Arabic Dialect Classifications with an Unsupervised Cross-Encoder

This study undertakes a comprehensive investigation of transformer-based models to advance Arabic language processing, focusing on two pivotal aspects: the estimation of Arabic Level of Dialectness and dialectal sentence-level machine translation into Modern Standard Arabic. We conducted various evaluations of different sentence transformers across a proposed regression model, showing that the MARBERT transformer-based proposed regression model achieved the best root mean square error of 0.1403 for Arabic Level of Dialectness estimation. In parallel, we developed bi-directional translation models between Modern Standard Arabic and four specific Arabic dialects—Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, and Palestinian—by fine-tuning and evaluating different sequence-to-sequence transformers. This approach significantly improved translation quality, achieving a BLEU score of 0.1713. We also enhanced our evaluation capabilities by integrating MSA predictions from the machine translation model into our Arabic Level of Dialectness estimation framework, forming a comprehensive pipeline that not only demonstrates the effectiveness of our methodologies but also establishes a new benchmark in the deployment of advanced Arabic NLP technologies.

ASOS at NADI 2024 shared task: Bridging Dialectness Estimation and MSA Machine Translation for Arabic Language Enhancement

This paper presents the contribution of our dzNLP team to the NADI 2024 shared task, specifically in Subtask 1 - Multi-label Country-level Dialect Identification (MLDID) (Closed Track). We explored various configurations to address the challenge: in Experiment 1, we utilized a union of n-gram analyzers (word, character, character with word boundaries) with different n-gram values; in Experiment 2, we combined a weighted union of Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) features with various weights; and in Experiment 3, we implemented a weighted major voting scheme using three classifiers: Linear Support Vector Classifier (LSVC), Random Forest (RF), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). Our approach, despite its simplicity and reliance on traditional machine learning techniques, demonstrated competitive performance in terms of accuracy and precision. Notably, we achieved the highest precision score of 63.22% among the participating teams. However, our overall F1 score was approximately 21%, significantly impacted by a low recall rate of 12.87%. This indicates that while our models were highly precise, they struggled to recall a broad range of dialect labels, highlighting a critical area for improvement in handling diverse dialectal variations.

dzNLP at NADI 2024 Shared Task: Multi-Classifier Ensemble with Weighted Voting and TF-IDF Features

This paper describes our submissions to the Multi-label Country-level Dialect Identification subtask of the NADI2024 shared task, organized during the second edition of the ArabicNLP conference. Our submission is based on the ensemble of fine-tuned BERT-based models, after implementing the Similarity-Induced Mono-to-Multi Label Transformation (SIMMT) on the input data. Our submission ranked first with a Macro-Average (MA) F1 score of 50.57%.

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Cher at KSAA-CAD 2024: Compressing Words and Definitions into the Same Space for Arabic Reverse Dictionary

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