Arabic Dialect Handling in Hybrid Machine Translation

In this paper, we describe an extension to a hybrid machine translation system for handling dialect Arabic, using a decoding algorithm to normalize non-standard, spontaneous and dialectal Arabic into Modern Standard Arabic. We prove the feasibility of the approach by measuring and comparing machine translation results in terms of BLEU with and without the proposed approach. We show in our tests that on real-live broadcast input with transcriptions of dialectal speech we achieve an increase on BLEU of about 1%, and on web content with dialect text of about 2%.