United Arab Emirates

Speech translation (ST) is the task of directly translating acoustic speech signals in a source language into text in a foreign language. ST task has been addressed, for a long time, using a pipeline approach with two modules : first an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the source language followed by a text-to-text Machine translation (MT). In the past few years, we have seen a paradigm shift towards the end-to-end approaches using sequence-to-sequence deep neural network models. This paper presents our efforts towards the development of the first Broadcast News end-to-end Arabic to English speech translation system. Starting from independent ASR and MT LDC releases, we were able to identify about 92 hours of Arabic audio recordings for which the manual transcription was also translated into English at the segment level. These data was used to train and compare pipeline and end-to-end speech translation systems under multiple scenarios including transfer learning and data augmentation techniques.

EMNLP 2022

End-to-End Speech Translation of Arabic to English Broadcast News

arabic to english

speech recognition

speech translation

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022!  I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent.  Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm.  We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community.  Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well:  we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

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Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Emoji (digital pictograms) are crucial features for textual sentiment analysis. However, analysing the sentiment roles of emoji is very complex. This is due to its dependency on different factors, such as textual context, cultural perspective, interlocutor's personal traits,  interlocutors' relationships or a platforms' functional features. This work introduces an approach to analysing the sentiment effects of emoji as textual features. Using an Arabic dataset as a benchmark, our results confirm the borrowed argument that each emoji has three different norms of sentiment role (negative, neutral or positive). Therefore, an emoji can play different sentiment roles depending upon the context. It can behave as an emphasizer, an indicator, a mitigator, a reverser or a trigger of either negative or positive sentiment within a text. In addition, an emoji may have a neutral effect (i.e., no effect) on the sentiment of the text.

Emoji Sentiment Roles for Sentiment Analysis: A Case Study in Arabic Texts

Arabic diacritic recovery is important for a variety of downstream tasks such as text-to-speech. In this paper, we introduce a new Gulf Arabic diacritization dataset composed of 19,850 words based on a subset of the Gumar corpus.  We provide comprehensive set of guidelines for diacritization to enable the diacritization of more data.  We also report on diacritization results based on the new corpus using a Hidden Markov Model and character-based sequence to sequence models.

Gulf Arabic Diacritization: Guidelines, Initial Dataset, and Results

Wikipedia is a common source of training data for Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, especially as a source for corpora in languages other than English. However, for many downstream NLP tasks, it is important to understand the degree to which these corpora reflect representative contributions of native speakers. In particular, many entries in a given language may be translated from other languages or produced through other automated mechanisms. Language models built using corpora like Wikipedia can embed history, culture, bias, stereotypes, politics, and more, but it is important to understand whose views are actually being represented. In this paper, we present a case study focusing specifically on differences among the Arabic Wikipedia editions (Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, and Moroccan). In particular, we document issues in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia with automatic creation/generation and translation of content pages from English without human supervision. These issues could substantially affect the performance and accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) trained from these corpora, producing models that lack the cultural richness and meaningful representation of native speakers. Fortunately, the metadata maintained by Wikipedia provides visibility into these issues, but unfortunately, this is not the case for all corpora used to train LLMs.

Learning From Arabic Corpora But Not Always From Arabic Speakers: A Case Study of the Arabic Wikipedia Editions

This paper presents an open-source software library that provides a set of finite-state transducer (FST) components and corresponding utilities for manipulating the writing systems of languages that use the Perso-Arabic script. The operations include various levels of script normalization, including visual invariance-preserving operations that subsume and go beyond the standard Unicode normalization forms, as well as transformations that modify the visual appearance of characters in accordance with the regional orthographies for eleven contemporary languages from diverse language families. The library also provides simple FST-based romanization and transliteration. We additionally attempt to formalize the typology of Perso-Arabic characters by providing one-to-many mappings from Unicode code points to the languages that use them. While our work focuses on the Arabic script diaspora rather than Arabic itself, this approach could be adopted for any language that uses the Arabic script, thus providing a unified framework for treating a script family used by close to a billion people.

Beyond Arabic: Software for Perso-Arabic Script Manipulation

Coreference resolution is a key aspect of text comprehension, but the size of the available coreference corpora for Arabic is limited in comparison to the size of the corpora for other languages. In this paper we present a Game-With-A-Purpose called Stroll with a Scroll created to collect from players coreference annotations for Arabic. The key contribution of this work is the embedding of the annotation task in a virtual world setting, as opposed to the puzzle-type games used in previously proposed Games-With-A-Purpose for coreference.

Coreference Annotation of an Arabic Corpus using a Virtual World Game

This article describes the language identification system used by the SUKI team in the 2022 Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task. In addition to the system description, we give some details of the dialect identification experiments we conducted while preparing our submissions. In the end, we submitted only one official run. We used a Naive Bayes-based language identifier with character n-grams from one to four, of which we implemented a new version, which automatically optimizes its parameters. We also experimented with clustering the training data according to different topics. With the macro F1 score of 0.1963 on test set A and 0.1058 on test set B, we achieved the 18th position out of the 19 competing teams.

Optimizing Naive Bayes for Arabic Dialect Identification

We describe our submitted system to the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task. We tackled only the first subtask (Subtask 1). We used state-of-the-art Deep Learning models and pre-trained contextualized text representation models that we finetuned according to the downstream task in hand. As a first approach, we used BERT Arabic variants: MARBERT with its two versions MARBERT v1 and MARBERT v2, we combined MARBERT embeddings with a CNN classifier, and finally, we tested the Quasi-Recurrent Neural Networks (QRNN) model. The results found show that version 2 of MARBERT outperforms all of the previously mentioned models on Subtask 1.

iCompass Working Notes for the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared task

Arabic has a widely varying collection of dialects. With the explosion of the use of social networks, the volume of written texts has remarkably increased. Most users express themselves using their own dialect. Unfortunately, many of these dialects remain under-studied due to the scarcity of resources. Researchers and industry practitioners are increasingly interested in analyzing users' sentiments. In this context, several approaches have been proposed, namely: traditional machine learning, deep learning transfer learning and more recently few-shot learning approaches. In this work, we compare their efficiency as part of the NADI competition to develop a country-level sentiment analysis model. Three models were beneficial for this sub-task: The first based on Sentence Transformer (ST) and achieve 43.23% on DEV set and 42.33% on TEST set, the second based on CAMeLBERT and achieve 47.85% on DEV set and 41.72% on TEST set and the third based on multi-dialect BERT model and achieve 66.72% on DEV set and 39.69% on TEST set.

Benchmarking transfer learning approaches for sentiment analysis of Arabic dialect

In this paper, we present our findings in the two subtasks of the 2022 NADI shared task. First, in the Arabic dialect identification subtask, we find that there is heavy class imbalance, and propose to address this issue using focal loss. Our experiments with the focusing hyperparameter confirm that focal loss improves performance. Second, in the Arabic tweet sentiment analysis subtask, we deal with a smaller dataset, where text includes both Arabic dialects and Modern Standard Arabic. We propose to use transfer learning from both pre-trained MSA language models and our own model from the first subtask. Our system ranks in the 5th and 7th best spots of the leaderboards of first and second subtasks respectively.

Ahmed and Khalil at NADI 2022: Transfer Learning and Addressing Class Imbalance for Arabic Dialect Identification and Sentiment Analysis

Dialect Identification is important to improve the performance of various application as translation, speech recognition, etc. In this paper, we present our findings and results in the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2022) for country-level dialect identification and sentiment identification for dialectical Arabic. The proposed model is an ensemble between fine-tuned BERT-based models and various approaches of prompt-tuning. Our model secured first place on the leaderboard for subtask 1 with an 27.06 F1-macro score, and subtask 2 secured first place with 75.15 F1-PN score. Our findings show that prompt-tuning-based models achieved better performance when compared to fine-tuning and Multi-task based methods. Moreover, using an ensemble of different loss functions might improve model performance.

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