Arabic Dialect Classification using RNNs, Transformers, and Large Language Models: A Comparative Analysis
This work addresses dialect identification for Arabic speakers, enabling applications like personalized chatbots and social media monitoring, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific dataset.
The study tackled Arabic dialect classification by comparing RNNs, Transformers, and LLMs on the QADI dataset of 18 dialects, with MARBERTv2 achieving the best performance at 65% accuracy and 64% F1-score.
The Arabic language is among the most popular languages in the world with a huge variety of dialects spoken in 22 countries. In this study, we address the problem of classifying 18 Arabic dialects of the QADI dataset of Arabic tweets. RNN models, Transformer models, and large language models (LLMs) via prompt engineering are created and tested. Among these, MARBERTv2 performed best with 65% accuracy and 64% F1-score. Through the use of state-of-the-art preprocessing techniques and the latest NLP models, this paper identifies the most significant linguistic issues in Arabic dialect identification. The results corroborate applications like personalized chatbots that respond in users' dialects, social media monitoring, and greater accessibility for Arabic communities.