Advancing Dialectal Arabic to Modern Standard Arabic Machine Translation

Summary

This paper explores Dialectal Arabic (DA) to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) machine translation using prompting and fine-tuning techniques for Levantine, Egyptian, and Gulf dialects. The study found that few-shot prompting outperformed zero-shot and chain-of-thought methods across six large language models, with GPT-4o achieving the highest performance. A quantized Gemma2-9B model achieved a chrF++ score of 49.88, outperforming zero-shot GPT-4o (44.58). Why it matters: The research provides a resource-efficient pipeline for DA-MSA translation, enabling more inclusive language technologies by addressing the challenges posed by dialectal variations in Arabic.