The Helsinki-NLP Submissions at NADI 2023 Shared Task: Walking the Baseline
Yves Scherrer, Aleksandra Miletić, Olli Kuparinen · 2023
The Helsinki-NLP team participated in the NADI 2023 shared tasks on Arabic dialect translation with seven submissions.We used statistical (SMT) and neural machine translation (NMT) methods and explored characterand subword-based data preprocessing.Our submissions placed second in both tracks.In the open track, our winning submission is a character-level SMT system with additional Modern Standard Arabic language models.In the closed track, our best BLEU scores were obtained with the leave-as-is baseline, a simple copy of the input, and narrowly followed by SMT systems.In both tracks, fine-tuning existing multilingual models such as AraT5 or ByT5 did not yield superior performance compared to SMT.