@inproceedings{scherrer-etal-2023-helsinki,
    title = "The {H}elsinki-{NLP} Submissions at {NADI} 2023 Shared Task: Walking the Baseline",
    author = "Scherrer, Yves  and
      Mileti{\'c}, Aleksandra  and
      Kuparinen, Olli",
    editor = "Sawaf, Hassan  and
      El-Beltagy, Samhaa  and
      Zaghouani, Wajdi  and
      Magdy, Walid  and
      Abdelali, Ahmed  and
      Tomeh, Nadi  and
      Abu Farha, Ibrahim  and
      Habash, Nizar  and
      Khalifa, Salam  and
      Keleg, Amr  and
      Haddad, Hatem  and
      Zitouni, Imed  and
      Mrini, Khalil  and
      Almatham, Rawan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023",
    month = dec,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Singapore (Hybrid)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2023.arabicnlp-1.73/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.arabicnlp-1.73",
    pages = "670--677",
    abstract = "The Helsinki-NLP team participated in the NADI 2023 shared tasks on Arabic dialect translation with seven submissions. We used statistical (SMT) and neural machine translation (NMT) methods and explored character- and subword-based data preprocessing. Our submissions placed second in both tracks. In the open track, our winning submission is a character-level SMT system with additional Modern Standard Arabic language models. In the closed track, our best BLEU scores were obtained with the leave-as-is baseline, a simple copy of the input, and narrowly followed by SMT systems. In both tracks, fine-tuning existing multilingual models such as AraT5 or ByT5 did not yield superior performance compared to SMT."
}