arXiv Computation and Language By Josef Jon, Rawan Bondok, Ond\v{r}ej Bojar

Current state of LLMs for Arabic dialectal machine translation

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This study evaluates large language models (LLMs) for English‑to‑dialectal Arabic machine translation using the MADAR dataset across 16 Arabic dialects, covering both translation directions. It compares specialized Arabic models (Jais, Nile), multilingual models (Gemma, Command‑R, Mistral, Aya), and commercial APIs (GPT‑4.1) with multiple metrics—BLEU, CHRF, COMET, GEMBA—and a small manual assessment. The authors also examine LLMs’ ability to classify dialects and discuss challenges in automatic MT evaluation for Arabic dialects, noting potential training data contamination.

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