Authors: Alnajjar, Khalid ¹; Hämäläinen, Mika ²

• 1 Rootroo Ltd
• 2 Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences

We present an encoder-decored based model for normalization of Arabic dialects using both BERT and GPT-2 based models. Arabic is a language of many dialects that not only differ from the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in terms of pronunciation but also in terms of morphology, grammar and lexical choice. This diversity can be troublesome even to a native Arabic speaker let alone a computer. Several NLP tools work well for MSA and in some of the main dialects but fail to cover Arabic language as a whole. Based on our manual evaluation, our model normalizes sentences entirely correctly 46\% of the time and almost correctly 26\% of the time.