In this era of rapid technological advancements, communication continues to evolve as new linguistic phenomena emerge. Among these is Arabizi, a hybrid form of Arabic that incorporates Latin characters and numbers to represent the spoken dialects of Arab communities. Arabizi is widely used on social media and allows people to communicate in an informal and dynamic way, but it poses significant challenges for machine translation due to its lack of formal structure and deeply embedded cultural nuances. This case study arises from a growing need to translate Arabizi for gisting purposes. It evaluates the capacity of different LLMs to decode and translate Arabizi, focusing on multiple Arabic dialects that have rarely been studied up until now. Using a combination of human evaluators and automatic metrics, this research project investigates the model's performance in translating Arabizi into both Modern Standard Arabic and English. Key questions explored include which dialects are translated most effectively and whether translations into English surpass those into Arabic.

This study addresses the task of Unknown Sense Detection in English and Swedish. The primary objective of this task is to determine whether the meaning of a particular word usage is documented in a dictionary or not. For this purpose, sense entries are compared with word usages from modern and historical corpora using a pre-trained Word-in-Context embedder that allows us to model this task in a few-shot scenario. Additionally, we use human annotations to adapt and evaluate our models. Compared to a random sample from a corpus, our model is able to considerably increase the detected number of word usages with non-recorded senses.

Word meaning changes over time, depending on linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Associating a word's correct meaning in its historical context is a critical challenge in diachronic research, and is relevant to a range of NLP tasks, including information retrieval and semantic search in historical texts. Bayesian models for semantic change have emerged as a powerful tool to address this challenge, providing explicit and interpretable representations of semantic change phenomena. However, while corpora typically come with rich metadata, existing models are limited by their inability to exploit contextual information (such as text genre) beyond the document time-stamp. This is particularly critical in the case of ancient languages, where lack of data and long diachronic span make it harder to draw a clear distinction between polysemy and semantic change, and current systems perform poorly on these languages. We develop GASC, a dynamic semantic change model that leverages categorical metadata about the texts' genre information to boost inference and uncover the evolution of meanings in Ancient Greek corpora. In a new evaluation framework, we show that our model achieves improved predictive performance compared to the state of the art.