Transformer models have significantly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP), demonstrating strong performance in English. However, their effectiveness in Arabic, particularly for Named Entity Recognition (NER), remains limited, even with larger pre-trained models. This performance gap stems from multiple factors, including tokenisation, dataset quality, and annotation inconsistencies. Existing studies often analyze these issues in isolation, failing to capture their joint effect on system behaviour and performance. We introduce DeformAr (Debugging and Evaluation Framework for Transformer-based NER Systems), a novel framework designed to investigate and explain the performance discrepancy between Arabic and English NER systems. DeformAr integrates a data extraction library and an interactive dashboard, supporting two modes of evaluation: cross-component analysis and behavioural analysis. The framework divides each language into dataset and model components to examine their interactions. The analysis proceeds in two stages. First, cross-component analysis provides systematic diagnostic measures across data and model subcomponents, addressing the "what," "how," and "why" behind observed discrepancies. The second stage applies behavioural analysis by combining interpretability techniques with token-level metrics, interactive visualisations, and representation space analysis. These stages enable a component-aware diagnostic process that detects model behaviours and explains them by linking them to underlying representational patterns and data factors. DeformAr is the first Arabic-specific, component-based interpretability tool, offering a crucial resource for advancing model analysis in under-resourced languages.

This study presents EgyBERT, an Arabic language model pretrained on 10.4 GB of Egyptian dialectal texts. We evaluated EgyBERT's performance by comparing it with five other multidialect Arabic language models across 10 evaluation datasets. EgyBERT achieved the highest average F1-score of 84.25% and an accuracy of 87.33%, significantly outperforming all other comparative models, with MARBERTv2 as the second best model achieving an F1-score 83.68% and an accuracy 87.19%. Additionally, we introduce two novel Egyptian dialectal corpora: the Egyptian Tweets Corpus (ETC), containing over 34.33 million tweets (24.89 million sentences) amounting to 2.5 GB of text, and the Egyptian Forums Corpus (EFC), comprising over 44.42 million sentences (7.9 GB of text) collected from various Egyptian online forums. Both corpora are used in pretraining the new model, and they are the largest Egyptian dialectal corpora to date reported in the literature. Furthermore, this is the first study to evaluate the performance of various language models on Egyptian dialect datasets, revealing significant differences in performance that highlight the need for more dialect-specific models. The results confirm the effectiveness of EgyBERT model in processing and analyzing Arabic text expressed in Egyptian dialect, surpassing other language models included in the study. EgyBERT model is publicly available on \url{https://huggingface.co/faisalq/EgyBERT}.

This paper presents the contribution of our dzNLP team to the NADI 2024 shared task, specifically in Subtask 1 - Multi-label Country-level Dialect Identification (MLDID) (Closed Track). We explored various configurations to address the challenge: in Experiment 1, we utilized a union of n-gram analyzers (word, character, character with word boundaries) with different n-gram values; in Experiment 2, we combined a weighted union of Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) features with various weights; and in Experiment 3, we implemented a weighted major voting scheme using three classifiers: Linear Support Vector Classifier (LSVC), Random Forest (RF), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). Our approach, despite its simplicity and reliance on traditional machine learning techniques, demonstrated competitive performance in terms of F1-score and precision. Notably, we achieved the highest precision score of 63.22% among the participating teams. However, our overall F1 score was approximately 21%, significantly impacted by a low recall rate of 12.87%. This indicates that while our models were highly precise, they struggled to recall a broad range of dialect labels, highlighting a critical area for improvement in handling diverse dialectal variations.

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.

Driven by the goal of eradicating language barriers on a global scale, machine translation has solidified itself as a key focus of artificial intelligence research today. However, such efforts have coalesced around a small subset of languages, leaving behind the vast majority of mostly low-resource languages. What does it take to break the 200 language barrier while ensuring safe, high quality results, all while keeping ethical considerations in mind? In No Language Left Behind, we took on this challenge by first contextualizing the need for low-resource language translation support through exploratory interviews with native speakers. Then, we created datasets and models aimed at narrowing the performance gap between low and high-resource languages. More specifically, we developed a conditional compute model based on Sparsely Gated Mixture of Experts that is trained on data obtained with novel and effective data mining techniques tailored for low-resource languages. We propose multiple architectural and training improvements to counteract overfitting while training on thousands of tasks. Critically, we evaluated the performance of over 40,000 different translation directions using a human-translated benchmark, Flores-200, and combined human evaluation with a novel toxicity benchmark covering all languages in Flores-200 to assess translation safety. Our model achieves an improvement of 44% BLEU relative to the previous state-of-the-art, laying important groundwork towards realizing a universal translation system.

We present the results and findings of the First Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI). This Shared Task includes two subtasks: country-level dialect identification (Subtask 1) and province-level sub-dialect identification (Subtask 2). The data for the shared task covers a total of 100 provinces from 21 Arab countries and are collected from the Twitter domain. As such, NADI is the first shared task to target naturally-occurring fine-grained dialectal text at the sub-country level. A total of 61 teams from 25 countries registered to participate in the tasks, thus reflecting the interest of the community in this area. We received 47 submissions for Subtask 1 from 18 teams and 9 submissions for Subtask 2 from 9 teams.