Singapore

Named entity recognition (NER) is one of many challenging tasks in Arabic Natural Language Processing. It is also the base of many critical downstream tasks to help understand the source of major trends and public opinions. In this paper, we will describe our submission in the WojoodNER Shared Task of ArabicNLP 2023. We used a simple machine reading comprehension-based technique in the Flat NER Subtask ranking eighth on the leaderboard with a 91.13% F1-score. For the Nested NER Subtask, we fine-tuned a pre-trained language model and got a 92.61% F1 score ranking third on the leaderboard.

EMNLP 2023

AlexU-AIC at WojoodNER shared task: Sequence Labeling vs MRC and SWA for Arabic Named Entity Recognition

arabic named entity recognition

machine reading comprehension

sequence labeling

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

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

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a crucial task in natural language processing that facilitates the extraction of vital information from text. However, NER for Arabic presents a significant challenge due to the language's unique characteristics. In this paper, we introduce AraBINDER, our submission to the Wojood NER Shared Task 2023 (ArabicNLP 2023). The shared task comprises two sub-tasks: sub-task 1 focuses on Flat NER, while sub-task 2 centers on Nested NER.
We have participated in both sub-tasks. The Bi-Encoder has proven its efficiency for NER in English. We employ AraBINDER (Arabic Bi-Encoder for Named Entity Recognition), which uses the power of two transformer encoders and employs
contrastive learning to map candidate text spans and entity types into the same vector representation space. This approach frames NER as a representation learning problem that maximizes the similarity between the vector representations of an
entity mention and its type. Our experiments reveal that AraBINDER achieves a micro F-1 score of 0.918 for Flat NER and 0.9 for Nested NER on the Wojood dataset.

Alex-U 2023 NLP at WojoodNER shared task: AraBINDER (Bi-encoder for Arabic Named Entity Recognition) | VIDEO

In this presentation, I focused on the lack of availability of an Omani Arabic dialect (OA) parallel dataset, as well as MT of OA to English. The study uses social media data from X (formerly Twitter) to build an authentic parallel text of the Omani dialects. The research presents baseline results on this dataset using Google Translate, Microsoft Translation, and Marian NMT. A taxonomy of the most common linguistic errors is used to analyze the translations made by the NMT systems to provide insights on future improvements. Finally, transfer learning is used to adapt Marian NMT to the Omani dialect, with a significant improvement of 9.88 points in the BLEU score. 


Machine Translation of Omani Arabic Dialect from Social Media | VIDEO

This is the outline of our participation in the WojoodNER shared task, part of the inaugural ArabicNLP conference. The core of our submissions revolves around DiffusionNER models which conceptualize NER as a boundary denoising diffusion process. Notably, our experiments in Nested NER resulted in a micro F1-score of 93.73% and ranking first overall. In addition, our primary flat NER system placed third, with a micro F1-score of 91.92%.

ELYADATA at WojoodNER Shared Task: Data and Model-centric Approaches for Arabic Flat and Nested NER

As Electronic Health Records (EHR) become ubiquitous in healthcare systems worldwide, including in Arabic-speaking countries, the dual imperative of safeguarding patient privacy and leveraging data for research and quality improvement grows. We present a first-of-its-kind automated de-identification pipeline for medical text specifically tailored for the Arabic language. This includes accurate medical Named Entity Recognition (NER) for identifying personal information; data obfuscation models to replace sensitive entities with fake entities; and an implementation that natively scales to large datasets on commodity clusters.
We present the two principal contributions: First, we adapt two existing NER architectures— BERT For Token Classification (BFTC) and BiLSTM-CNN-Char – to accommodate the unique syntactic and morphological characteristics of the Arabic language. Comparative analysis suggests that BFTC models outperform Bi-LSTM models, achieving higher F1 scores for both identifying and redacting personally identifiable information (PII) from Arabic medical texts. Second, we augment the deep learning models with a contextual parser engine to handle commonly missed entities. Experiments show that the combined pipeline demonstrates superior performance with micro F1 scores ranging from 0.94 to 0.98 on the test dataset, which is a translated version of the i2b2 2014 de-identification challenge, across 17 sensitive entities. This level of accuracy is in line with that achieved with manual de-identification by domain experts, suggesting that a fully automated and scalable process is now viable.

Automated De-Identification of Arabic Medical Records

This paper provides a systematic analysis and comparison of the performance of state-of-the-art models on the task of fine-grained Arabic dialect identification using the MADAR parallel corpus. We test approaches based on pre-trained transformer language models in addition to Naive Bayes models with a rich set of various features. Through a comprehensive data- and error analysis, we provide
valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. We discuss which dialects are more challenging to differentiate, and identify potential sources of errors. 
Our analysis reveals an important problem with identical sentences across dialect classes in the test set of the MADAR-26 corpus, which may confuse any classifier. We also show that none of the tested approaches captures the subtle distinctions between closely related dialects.

Arabic dialect identification: An in-depth error analysis on the MADAR parallel corpus | VIDEO

Nexus at ArAIEval Shared Task: Fine-Tuning Arabic Language Models for Propaganda and Disinformation Detection

Most recent models for Arabic topic classification leveraged fine-tuning existing pre-trained transformer models and targeted a limited number of categories. More recently, advances in automated ML and generative models introduced novel potentials for the task. While these approaches work for English, it is a question of
whether they perform well for low-resourced languages; Arabic in particular. This paper presents (i) ArBNTopic; a novel Arabic dataset with an extended 14-topic class set covering modern books from social sciences and humanities along with newspaper articles, and (ii) a set of topic classifiers built from it. We fine-tuned
an open LLM model to build ArGTC. We compared its performance against the best models built with Vertex AI (Google), AutoML(H2O), and AutoTrain(HuggingFace). ArGTC outperformed the VertexAi and AutoML models and was reasonably similar to the AutoTrain model.

Arabic Topic Classification in the Generative and AutoML Era

In this paper, we highlight our approach for the "Arabic AI Tasks Evaluation ArAiEval)
Shared Task 2023". We present our approaches for task 1-A and task 2-A of the shared task which focus on persuasion technique detection and disinformation detection respectively. Detection of persuasion techniques and disinformation has become imperative to avoid distortion of authentic information. The tasks use multigenre snippets of tweets and news articles for the given binary classification problem. We experiment with several transformer-based models that were pre-trained on the Arabic language. We fine-tune these state-of-the-art models on the provided dataset. Ensembling is employed to enhance the performance of the systems. We achieved a micro F1-score of 0.742 on task 1-A (8th rank on the leaderboard) and 0.901 on task 2-A (7th rank on the leaderboard) respectively.

Mavericks at ArAIEval Shared Task: Towards a Safer Digital Space - Transformer Ensemble Models Tackling Deception and Persuasion

In this paper, we present our approach for the "Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) Shared Task 2023". We highlight our methodology for subtask 1 which deals with country level dialect identification. Recognizing dialects plays an instrumental role in enhancing the performance of various downstream NLP tasks such as speech recognition and translation. The task uses the Twitter dataset (TWT-2023) that encompasses 18 dialects for the multi-class classification problem. Numerous transformer based models, pre-trained on Arabic language,
are employed for identifying country-level dialects. We fine-tune these state-of-the art models on the provided dataset. The ensembling method is leveraged to yield improved performance of the system. We achieved an F1-score of 76.65 (11th rank on the leaderboard) on the test dataset

Mavericks at NADI 2023 Shared Task: Unravelling Regional Nuances through Dialect Identification using Transformer-based Approach | VIDEO

Numerous languages exhibit shared characteristics, be it in their scripts or morphological features. For instance, Arabic and Persian utilize the same script, whereas Arabic and Russian both belong to the fusional language category. The question arises: Do such common traits influence language comprehension across diverse linguistic backgrounds? This study explores the possibility of transferring comprehension skills across languages to Arabic in a zero-shot scenario. Specifically, we demonstrate that training language models on other languages can enhance comprehension of Arabic, as evidenced by our evaluations in three key tasks: natural language inference, question answering, and named entity recognition. Our experiments reveal that certain morphologically rich languages (MRLs), such as Russian, display similarities to Arabic when assessed in a zero-shot context, particularly in tasks like question answering and natural language inference. However, this similarity is less pronounced in tasks like named entity recognition.



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Alex-U 2023 NLP at WojoodNER shared task: AraBINDER (Bi-encoder for Arabic Named Entity Recognition) | VIDEO