UniManc at NADI 2023 Shared Task: A Comparison of Various T5-based Models for Translating Arabic Dialectical Text to Modern Standard Arabic
Abdullah Khered, Ingy Abdelhalim, Nadine Abdelhalim, Ahmed Soliman, Riza Batista-Navarro · 2023
This paper presents the methods we developed for the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) 2023 shared task, specifically targeting the two subtasks focussed on sentence-level machine translation (MT) of text written in any of four Arabic dialects (Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian and Palestinian) to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).Our team, UniManc, employed models based on T5: multilingual T5 (mT5), multi-task fine-tuned mT5 (mT0) and AraT5.These models were trained based on two configurations: joint model training for all regional dialects (J-R) and independent model training for every regional dialect (I-R).Based on the results of the official NADI 2023 evaluation, our I-R AraT5 model obtained an overall BLEU score of 14.76, ranking first in the Closed Dialect-to-MSA MT subtask.Moreover, in the Open Dialect-to-MSA MT subtask, our J-R AraT5 model also ranked first, obtaining an overall BLEU score of 21.10.