Neural networks have become the state-of-the-art approach for machine translation (MT) in many languages. While linguistically-motivated tokenization techniques were shown to have significant effects on the performance of statistical MT, it remains unclear if those techniques are well suited for neural MT. In this paper, we systematically compare neural and statistical MT models for Arabic-English translation on data preprecossed by various prominent tokenization schemes. Furthermore, we consider a range of data and vocabulary sizes and compare their effect on both approaches. Our empirical results show that the best choice of tokenization scheme is largely based on the type of model and the size of data. We also show that we can gain significant improvements using a system selection that combines the output from neural and statistical MT.
Communication tools make the world like a small village and as a consequence people can contact with others who are from different societies or who speak different languages. This communication cannot happen effectively without Machine Translation because they can be found anytime and everywhere. There are a number of studies that have developed Machine Translation for the English language with so many other languages except the Arabic it has not been considered yet. Therefore we aim to highlight a roadmap for our proposed translation machine to provide an enhanced Arabic English translation b…
National Center for AI and Big Data Technology（国家人工智能与大数据技术中心）；King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST)（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王科技城（KACST））
In this paper, we present a recipe for building a good Arabic-English neural machine translation. We compare neural systems with traditional phrase-based systems using various parallel corpora including UN, ISI and Ummah. We also investigate the importance of special preprocessing of the Arabic script. The presented results are based on test sets from NIST MT 2005 and 2012. The best neural system produces a gain of +13 BLEU points compared to an equivalent simple phrase-based system in NIST MT12 test set. Unexpectedly, we find that tuning a model trained on the whole data using a small high qu…
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）
The paper describes the Egyptian Arabic-to-English statistical machine translation (SMT) system that the QCRI-Columbia-NYUAD (QCN) group submitted to the NIST OpenMT'2015 competition. The competition focused on informal dialectal Arabic, as used in SMS, chat, and speech. Thus, our efforts focused on processing and standardizing Arabic, e.g., using tools such as 3arrib and MADAMIRA. We further trained a phrase-based SMT system using state-of-the-art features and components such as operation sequence model, class-based language model, sparse features, neural network joint model, genre-based hier…
The acceleration in telecommunication needs leads to many groups of research, especially in communication facilitating and Machine Translation fields. While people contact with others having different languages and cultures, they need to have instant translations. However, the available instant translators are still providing somewhat bad Arabic-English Translations, for instance when translating books or articles, the meaning is not totally accurate. Therefore, using the semantic web techniques to deal with the homographs and homonyms semantically, the aim of this research is to extend a mode…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；The German University in Cairo（开罗德国大学）
We present our work on collecting ArzEn-ST, a code-switched Egyptian Arabic - English Speech Translation Corpus. This corpus is an extension of the ArzEn speech corpus, which was collected through informal interviews with bilingual speakers. In this work, we collect translations in both directions, monolingual Egyptian Arabic and monolingual English, forming a three-way speech translation corpus. We make the translation guidelines and corpus publicly available. We also report results for baseline systems for machine translation and speech translation tasks. We believe this is a valuable resour…
Spoken Language Translation (SLT) is becoming more widely used and becoming a communication tool that helps in crossing language barriers. One of the challenges of SLT is the translation from a language without gender agreement to a language with gender agreement such as English to Arabic. In this paper, we introduce an approach to tackle such limitation by enabling a Neural Machine Translation system to produce gender-aware translation. We show that NMT system can model the speaker/listener gender information to produce gender-aware translation. We propose a method to generate data used in ad…
Neural machine translation has become a major alternative to widely used phrase-based statistical machine translation. We notice however that much of research on neural machine translation has focused on European languages despite its language agnostic nature. In this paper, we apply neural machine translation to the task of Arabic translation (Ar<->En) and compare it against a standard phrase-based translation system. We run extensive comparison using various configurations in preprocessing Arabic script and show that the phrase-based and neural translation systems perform comparably to each …
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia（东英吉利大学计算科学学院）
We describe efforts towards getting better resources for English-Arabic machine translation of spoken text. In particular, we look at movie subtitles as a unique, rich resource, as subtitles in one language often get translated into other languages. Movie subtitles are not new as a resource and have been explored in previous research; however, here we create a much larger bi-text (the biggest to date), and we further generate better quality alignment for it. Given the subtitles for the same movie in different languages, a key problem is how to align them at the fragment level. Typically, this …
The German University in Cairo（开罗德国大学）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Raisa Energy LLC（赖萨能源有限责任公司）
Code-switching (CS) is a widespread phenomenon among bilingual and multilingual societies. The lack of CS resources hinders the performance of many NLP tasks. In this work, we explore the potential use of bilingual word embeddings for code-switching (CS) language modeling (LM) in the low resource Egyptian Arabic-English language. We evaluate different state-of-the-art bilingual word embeddings approaches that require cross-lingual resources at different levels and propose an innovative but simple approach that jointly learns bilingual word representations without the use of any parallel data, …
In this research paper, I will elaborate on a method to evaluate machine translation models based on their performance on underlying syntactical phenomena between English and Arabic languages. This method is especially important as such "neural" and "machine learning" are hard to fine-tune and change. Thus, finding a way to evaluate them easily and diversely would greatly help the task of bettering them.
Qatar Computing Research Institute – HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所 – 哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
This paper describes QCRI's machine translation systems for the IWSLT 2016 evaluation campaign. We participated in the Arabic->English and English->Arabic tracks. We built both Phrase-based and Neural machine translation models, in an effort to probe whether the newly emerged NMT framework surpasses the traditional phrase-based systems in Arabic-English language pairs. We trained a very strong phrase-based system including, a big language model, the Operation Sequence Model, Neural Network Joint Model and Class-based models along with different domain adaptation techniques such as MML filterin…
Recent progress in neural machine translation (NMT) has made it possible to translate successfully between monolingual language pairs where large parallel data exist, with pre-trained models improving performance even further. Although there exists work on translating in code-mixed settings (where one of the pairs includes text from two or more languages), it is still unclear what recent success in NMT and language modeling exactly means for translating code-mixed text. We investigate one such context, namely MT from code-mixed Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic (MSAEA) into English. W…
University of Surrey, UK（萨里大学（英国））；Centre for Translation Studies（翻译研究中心）
Since the advent of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) approaches there has been a tremendous improvement in the quality of automatic translation. However, NMT output still lacks accuracy in some low-resource languages and sometimes makes major errors that need extensive post-editing. This is particularly noticeable with texts that do not follow common lexico-grammatical standards, such as user generated content (UGC). In this paper we investigate the challenges involved in translating book reviews from Arabic into English, with particular focus on the errors that lead to incorrect translation o…
This paper presents our system entitled `LIIR' for SemEval-2020 Task 12 on Multilingual Offensive Language Identification in Social Media (OffensEval 2). We have participated in sub-task A for English, Danish, Greek, Arabic, and Turkish languages. We adapt and fine-tune the BERT and Multilingual Bert models made available by Google AI for English and non-English languages respectively. For the English language, we use a combination of two fine-tuned BERT models. For other languages we propose a cross-lingual augmentation approach in order to enrich training data and we use Multilingual BERT to…
As a result of the rapid changes in information and communication technology (ICT), the world has become a small village where people from all over the world connect with each other in dialogue and communication via the Internet. Also, communications have become a daily routine activity due to the new globalization where companies and even universities become global residing cross countries borders. As a result, translation becomes a needed activity in this connected world. ICT made it possible to have a student in one country take a course or even a degree from a different country anytime any…
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
Machine translation between Arabic and Hebrew has so far been limited by a lack of parallel corpora, despite the political and cultural importance of this language pair. Previous work relied on manually-crafted grammars or pivoting via English, both of which are unsatisfactory for building a scalable and accurate MT system. In this work, we compare standard phrase-based and neural systems on Arabic-Hebrew translation. We experiment with tokenization by external tools and sub-word modeling by character-level neural models, and show that both methods lead to improved translation performance, wit…
We present a multi-task learning framework for cross-lingual abstractive summarization to augment training data. Recent studies constructed pseudo cross-lingual abstractive summarization data to train their neural encoder-decoders. Meanwhile, we introduce existing genuine data such as translation pairs and monolingual abstractive summarization data into training. Our proposed method, Transum, attaches a special token to the beginning of the input sentence to indicate the target task. The special token enables us to incorporate the genuine data into the training data easily. The experimental re…
University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Meta AI
To date, efforts in the code-switching literature have focused for the most part on language identification, POS, NER, and syntactic parsing. In this paper, we address machine translation for code-switched social media data. We create a community shared task. We provide two modalities for participation: supervised and unsupervised. For the supervised setting, participants are challenged to translate English into Hindi-English (Eng-Hinglish) in a single direction. For the unsupervised setting, we provide the following language pairs: English and Spanish-English (Eng-Spanglish), and English and …
UNIVERSITE FERHAT ABBAS – SETIF 1（费哈特·阿巴斯大学-塞提夫1号）；Faculté des Sciences（理学院）；Université El Oued（乌埃勒大学）；Université Sétif -1-（塞提夫1号大学）；Université Souk Ahras（苏克阿赫拉斯大学）；Université BBA（巴特纳大学）
In this thesis, we address several important issues concerning the morphological analysis of Arabic language applied to textual data and machine translation. First, we provided an overview on machine translation, its history and its development, then we exposed human translation techniques for eventual inspiration in machine translation, and we exposed linguistic approaches and particularly indirect transfer approaches. Finally, we presented our contributions to the resolution of morphosyntactic problems in computer linguistics as multilingual information retrieval and machine translation. As …
Language-Specific versus Cross-Lingual Knowledge Graphs for Implicit Aspect Identification in Arabic: A Comparative Study of Reasoning and Adaptation Strategies
Our method for multi-lingual geoparsing uses monolingual tools and resources along with machine translation and alignment to return location words in many languages. Not only does our method save the time and cost of developing geoparsers for each language separately, but also it allows the possibility of a wide range of language capabilities within a single interface. We evaluated our method in our LanguageBridge prototype on location named entities using newswire, broadcast news and telephone conversations in English, Arabic and Chinese data from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). Our res…
The use of multilingual language models for tasks in low and high-resource languages has been a success story in deep learning. In recent times, Arabic has been receiving widespread attention on account of its dialectal variance. While prior research studies have tried to adapt these multilingual models for dialectal variants of Arabic, it still remains a challenging problem owing to the lack of sufficient monolingual dialectal data and parallel translation data of such dialectal variants. It remains an open problem on whether the limited dialectical data can be used to improve the models trai…
Baidu（百度）；Shanghai Pudong Development Bank（上海浦东发展银行）
Detecting sarcasm and verbal irony from people's subjective statements is crucial to understanding their intended meanings and real sentiments and positions in social scenarios. This paper describes the X-PuDu system that participated in SemEval-2022 Task 6, iSarcasmEval - Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic, which aims at detecting intended sarcasm in various settings of natural language understanding. Our solution finetunes pre-trained language models, such as ERNIE-M and DeBERTa, under the multilingual settings to recognize the irony from Arabic and English texts. Our system ra…
This paper discusses a new metric that has been applied to verify the quality in translation between sentence pairs in parallel corpora of Arabic-English. This metric combines two techniques, one based on sentence length and the other based on compression code length. Experiments on sample test parallel Arabic-English corpora indicate the combination of these two techniques improves accuracy of the identification of satisfactory and unsatisfactory sentence pairs compared to sentence length and compression code length alone. The new method proposed in this research is effective at filtering noi…
Sarcasm is a form of figurative language where the intended meaning of a sentence differs from its literal meaning. This poses a serious challenge to several Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and Author Profiling. In this paper, we present our participating system to the intended sarcasm detection task in English and Arabic languages. Our system\footnote{The source code of our system is available at \url{https://github.com/AbdelkaderMH/iSarcasmEval}} consists of three deep learning-based models leveraging two existing pre-trained languag…
The preprocessing phase is one of the key phases within the text classification pipeline. This study aims at investigating the impact of the preprocessing phase on text classification, specifically on offensive language and hate speech classification for Arabic text. The Arabic language used in social media is informal and written using Arabic dialects, which makes the text classification task very complex. Preprocessing helps in dimensionality reduction and removing useless content. We apply intensive preprocessing techniques to the dataset before processing it further and feeding it into the…
ZAEBUC-Spoken: A Multilingual Multidialectal Arabic-English Speech Corpus
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；United Arab Emirates University（阿联酋大学）；Zayed University（扎耶德大学）
Aston University（阿斯顿大学）；Folding Space（Folding Space公司）；University of Wolverhampton（伍尔弗汉普顿大学）
In this paper, an approach for hate speech detection against women in Arabic community on social media (e.g. Youtube) is proposed. In the literature, similar works have been presented for other languages such as English. However, to the best of our knowledge, not much work has been conducted in the Arabic language. A new hate speech corpus (Arabic\_fr\_en) is developed using three different annotators. For corpus validation, three different machine learning algorithms are used, including deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM) network and Bi-directional LSTM (Bi-…
We introduce the User-Aware Arabic Gender Rewriter, a user-centric web-based system for Arabic gender rewriting in contexts involving two users. The system takes either Arabic or English sentences as input, and provides users with the ability to specify their desired first and/or second person target genders. The system outputs gender rewritten alternatives of the Arabic input sentences (or their Arabic translations in case of English input) to match the target users' gender preferences.
Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University（萨塔姆·本·阿卜杜勒阿齐兹大学）
Image classification is an ongoing research challenge. Most of the available research focuses on image classification for the English language, however there is very little research on image classification for the Arabic language. Expanding image classification to Arabic has several applications. The present study investigated a method for generating Arabic labels for images of objects. The method used in this study involved a direct English to Arabic translation of the labels that are currently available on ImageNet, a database commonly used in image classification research. The purpose of th…
As natural language processing systems become more widespread, it is necessary to address fairness issues in their implementation and deployment to ensure that their negative impacts on society are understood and minimized. However, there is limited work that studies fairness using a multilingual and intersectional framework or on downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce four multilingual Equity Evaluation Corpora, supplementary test sets designed to measure social biases, and a novel statistical framework for studying unisectional and intersectional social biases in natural language proc…
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
This paper studies the impact of different types of features applied to learning to re-rank questions in community Question Answering. We tested our models on two datasets released in SemEval-2016 Task 3 on "Community Question Answering". Task 3 targeted real-life Web fora both in English and Arabic. Our models include bag-of-words features (BoW), syntactic tree kernels (TKs), rank features, embeddings, and machine translation evaluation features. To the best of our knowledge, structural kernels have barely been applied to the question reranking task, where they have to model paraphrase relati…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar（卡塔尔计算研究所（HBKU））；Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria（索非亚大学“圣克莱门特·奥赫里德斯基”）；Amazon, Barcelona, Spain（亚马逊（巴塞罗那））
We present ClaimRank, an online system for detecting check-worthy claims. While originally trained on political debates, the system can work for any kind of text, e.g., interviews or regular news articles. Its aim is to facilitate manual fact-checking efforts by prioritizing the claims that fact-checkers should consider first. ClaimRank supports both Arabic and English, it is trained on actual annotations from nine reputable fact-checking organizations (PolitiFact, FactCheck, ABC, CNN, NPR, NYT, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and Washington Post), and thus it can mimic the claim selection stra…
University of Tunis El Manar（突尼斯马纳尔大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Sentiment analysis is a task of natural language processing which has recently attracted increasing attention. However, sentiment analysis research has mainly been carried out for the English language. Although Arabic is ramping up as one of the most used languages on the Internet, only a few studies have focused on Arabic sentiment analysis so far. In this paper, we carry out an in-depth qualitative study of the most important research works in this context by presenting limits and strengths of existing approaches. In particular, we survey both approaches that leverage machine translation or …
Ecole nationale Supérieure d'Informatique, ESI（国立高等信息学院）
In academia, plagiarism is certainly not an emerging concern, but it became of a greater magnitude with the popularisation of the Internet and the ease of access to a worldwide source of content, rendering human-only intervention insufficient. Despite that, plagiarism is far from being an unaddressed problem, as computer-assisted plagiarism detection is currently an active area of research that falls within the field of Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Many software solutions emerged to help fulfil this task, and this paper presents an overview of plagiarism de…
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Raisa Energy LLC（Raisa Energy 有限责任公司）；The German University in Cairo（开罗德国大学）
Code-switching (CS), defined as the mixing of languages in conversations, has become a worldwide phenomenon. The prevalence of CS has been recently met with a growing demand and interest to build CS ASR systems. In this paper, we present our work on code-switched Egyptian Arabic-English automatic speech recognition (ASR). We first contribute in filling the huge gap in resources by collecting, analyzing and publishing our spontaneous CS Egyptian Arabic-English speech corpus. We build our ASR systems using DNN-based hybrid and Transformer-based end-to-end models. In this paper, we present a thor…
