Can Multilingual Language Models Transfer to an Unseen Dialect? A Case Study on North African Arabizi

Understand

Building natural language processing systems for non standardized and low resource languages is a difficult challenge.

• The recent success of large-scale multilingual pretrained language models provides new modeling tools to tackle this.
• In this work, we study the ability of multilingual language models to process an unseen dialect.
• We take user generated North-African Arabic as our case study, a resource-poor dialectal variety of Arabic with frequent code-mixing with French and written in Arabizi, a non-standardized transliteration of Arabic to Latin script.