@inproceedings{almaoui-etal-2025-arabizi,
    title = "{A}rabizi vs {LLM}s: Can the Genie Understand the Language of Aladdin?",
    author = "Almaoui, Perla Al  and
      Bouillon, Pierrette  and
      Hengchen, Simon",
    editor = {Bouillon, Pierrette  and
      Gerlach, Johanna  and
      Girletti, Sabrina  and
      Volkart, Lise  and
      Rubino, Raphael  and
      Sennrich, Rico  and
      L{\"a}ubli, Samuel  and
      Volk, Martin  and
      Espl{\`a}-Gomis, Miquel  and
      Vandeghinste, Vincent  and
      Moniz, Helena  and
      Szoc, Sara},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 2",
    month = jun,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Geneva, Switzerland",
    publisher = "European Association for Machine Translation",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.mtsummit-2.4/",
    pages = "28--41",
    ISBN = "978-2-9701897-1-8",
    abstract = "In an era of rapid technological advancements, communication continues to evolve as new linguistic phenomena emerge. Among these is Arabizi, a hybrid form of Arabic that incorporates Latin characters and numbers to represent the spoken dialects of Arab communities. Arabizi is Widely used on social media and allows people to communicate in an informal and dynamic way, but it poses significant challenges for machine translation due to its lack of formal structure and deeply embedded cultural nuances. This case study is motivated by a growing need to translate Arabizi for gisting purpose. It evaluates the capacity of different LLMs' to decode and translate Arabizi, focusing on multiple Arabic dialects that have rarely been studied up until now. Using a combination of human evaluators and automatic metrics, this research project investigates the model{'}s performance in translating Arabizi into both Modern Standard Arabic and English. Key questions explored include which dialects are translated most effectively and whether translations into English surpass those into Arabic."
}