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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, and enhancing text-to-speech systems. In this paper, we provide our findings and results in the 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 the first subtask. Whereas for the machine translation task, the submitted model achieved a BLEU score of 11.37 securing fourth and third place in the second and third subtasks. The proposed model utilizes parameter-efficient training methods which achieves better performance when compared to conventional fine-tuning during the experimentation phase.

EMNLP 2023

rematchka at NADI 2023 shared task: Parameter Efficient tuning for Dialect Identification and Dialect Machine Translation

parameter efficient fine-tuning

dialect identification

machine translation

workshop paper

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Through out the presentation, I highlight the main problems we tackled through out our paper titled "AAST-NLP at ArAIEval Shared Task: Tackling Persuasion Technique and Disinformation Detection using Pre-Trained Language Models On Imbalanced Datasets", Our research work mainly focuses on data imbalance in the provided datasets and ways used to tackle them.

AAST-NLP at ArAIEval Shared Task: Tackling Persuasion technique and Disinformation Detection using Pre-Trained Language Models On Imbalanced Datasets

This paper outlines a methodology aimed at combating disinformation in Arabic social media, a strategy that secured a first-place finish in tasks 2A and 2B at the ArAIEval shared task during the ArabicNLP 2023 workshop. Our team developed a hyperparameter-optimized pipeline centered around BERT-based models for the Arabic language, enhanced by a soft-voting ensemble strategy. Subsequent evaluation on the test dataset reveals that ensembles, although generally resilient, do not always outperform individual models. The primary contributions of this paper are its multifaceted strategy, which led to winning solutions for both binary (2A) and multiclass (2B) disinformation classification tasks.

DetectiveRedasers at ArAIEval Shared Task: Leveraging Transformer Ensembles for Arabic Deception Detection

We present ArTrivia, a new Arabic question answering dataset consisting of more than 10,000 question-answer pairs along with relevant passages, covering a wide range of 18 diverse topics in Arabic. We created our dataset using a newly proposed pipeline that leverages diverse structured data sources from Arabic Wikipedia. Moreover, we conducted a comprehensive statistical analysis of ArTrivia and assessed the performance of each component in our pipeline. Additionally, we compared the performance of ArTrivia against the existing TyDi QA dataset using various experimental setups. Our analysis highlights the significance of often overlooked aspects in dataset creation, such as answer normalization, in enhancing the quality of QA datasets. Our evaluation also shows that ArTrivia presents more challenging and out-of-distribution questions to TyDi, raising questions about the feasibility of using ArTrivia as a complementary dataset to TyDi.

ArTrivia: Harvesting Arabic Wikipedia to Build A New Arabic Question Answering Dataset | VIDEO

Recent advancements in self-supervised speech-representation learning for automatic speech recognition (ASR) approaches have significantly improved the results on many benchmarks with low-cost data labeling. In this paper, we train two self-supervised frameworks for ASR, namely wav2vec, and data2vec, in which we conduct multiple experiments and analyze their results. Furthermore, we introduce Aswat dataset, which covers multiple genres and features speakers with vocal ariety. Aswat contains 732 hours of clean Arabic speech that can be used in the pretraining task for learning latent speech representations, which results in achieving a lower word error rate (WER) in Arabic ASR. We report the baseline results and achieve state-of-the-art WERs of 11.7% and 10.3% on Common Voice (CV) and the second round of Multi-Genre Broadcast (MGB-2) respectively, as a result of including our dataset Aswat.

ASWAT: ARABIC AUDIO DATASET FOR AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION USING SPEECH-REPRESENTATION LEARNING

A Reverse Dictionary is a tool enabling users to discover a word based on its provided definition, meaning, or description. Such a technique proves valuable in various scenarios, aiding language learners who possess a description of a word without its identity, and benefiting writers seeking precise terminology. These scenarios often encapsulate what is referred to as the "Tip-of-the-Tongue" (TOT) phenomena. In this work, we present our winning solution for the Arabic Reverse Dictionary shared task. This task focuses on deriving a vector representation of an Arabic word from its accompanying description. The shared task encompasses two distinct subtasks: the first involves an Arabic definition as input, while the second employs an English definition. For the first subtask, our approach relies on an ensemble of finetuned Arabic BERT-based models, predicting the word embedding for a given definition. The final representation is obtained through averaging the output embeddings from each model within the ensemble. In contrast, the most effective solution for the second subtask involves translating the English test definitions into Arabic and applying them to the finetuned models originally trained for the first subtask. This straightforward method achieves the highest score across both subtasks.

Rosetta Stone at KSAA-RD Shared Task: A Hop From Language Modeling To Word--Definition Alignment

LowResContextQA at Qur'an QA 2023 Shared Task: Temporal and Sequential Representation Augmented Question Answering Span Detection in Arabic

KnowTellConvince at ArAIEval Shared Task: Disinformation and Persuasion Detection in Arabic using Similar and Contrastive Representation Alignment

This paper introduces a comprehensive system designed to address two natural language processing tasks: Passage Retrieval (Task A) and Reading Comprehension (Task B), applied to datasets related to the Holy Qur’an. Task A was treated as a measurement of a textual similarity problem where the system leverages OpenAI’s "text-embedding-ada-002" embedding model to transform textual content into
numerical representations, with cosine similarity serving as the proximity metric. Task B focuses on the extraction of answers from Qur’anic passages, employing the Generative Pre-trained Transformer-4 (GPT-4) language model. In Task A, the system is evaluated using the Mean Average Precision (MAP) metric, achieving MAP scores of 0.109438 and 0.06426543057 on the development and test datasets with an optimal similarity threshold set at 0.85. Task B evaluation employs partial Average Precision (pAP), where our system surpasses a baseline whole-passage retriever with pAP scores of 0.470 and 0.5393130538 on the development and test datasets, respectively.

Al-Jawaab at Qur’an QA 2023 Shared Task: Exploring Embeddings and GPT Models for Passage Retrieval and Reading Comprehension | VIDEO

In this paper we present our approach towards Arabic Dialect identification which was part of the 
The Fourth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2023). We tested several techniques to identify Arabic dialects. We obtained the best result by fine-tuning the pre-trained MARBERTv2 model with a modified training dataset. The training set was expanded by sorting tweets based on dialects, concatenating every two adjacent tweets, and adding them to the original dataset as new tweets. We achieved 82.87 on F1 score and we were at the seventh position among 16 participants.

UoT at NADI 2023 shared task: Automatic Arabic Dialect Identification is Made Possible

We present our approach to tackle Qur’an QA 2023 shared tasks A and B. To address the challenge of low-resourced training data, we rely on transfer learning together with a voting ensemble to improve prediction stability across multiple runs. Additionally, we employ different architectures and learning mechanisms for a range of Arabic pre-trained transformer-based models for both tasks. To identify unanswerable questions, we propose using a thresholding mechanism. Our top-performing systems greatly surpass the baseline performance on the hidden split, achieving a MAP score of 25.05% for task A and a partial Average Precision (pAP) of 57.11% for task B.

rematchka at NADI 2023 shared task: Parameter Efficient tuning for Dialect Identification and Dialect Machine Translation

Next from EMNLP 2023

AAST-NLP at ArAIEval Shared Task: Tackling Persuasion technique and Disinformation Detection using Pre-Trained Language Models On Imbalanced Datasets

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