NAMAA-Space/alexandriax-nilechat-ctx-aux

AlexandriaX-2026 · Subtask 1 — NileChat-3B QLoRA, context + back-translation (nilechat_ctx_aux)

English to dialectal Arabic dialogue translation over 13 Arabic varieties, from the NAMAA Community submission to AlexandriaX-2026 (ArabicNLP 2026 / EMNLP). A QLoRA adapter over UBC-NLP/NileChat-3B-Base, trained on the official turns with conversation context and augmented with 348,787 synthetic back-translated pairs built from a 358k-sentence dialectal corpus.

This is the data-augmentation arm of the team's NileChat ablation. Its result is negative and worth publishing as such: augmenting with 5.5x more synthetic than real data did not beat the plain context-free adapter on the official development set (22.77 vs 23.54 spBLEU). No submitted system uses back-translated data because of this measurement.

Task	AlexandriaX-2026 Subtask 1 (context-aware EN→DA dialogue translation)
Base model	UBC-NLP/NileChat-3B-Base (decoder-only, approx. 3B parameters, Arabic-dialect pretraining)
Adapter	LoRA r=16, α=32, dropout 0.05 — 119.8 MB, approx. 30M trainable parameters
Dialect control	prompt field (Country, dialect name)
Context	yes — the model's own previous turns are fed back as history
Extra data	NAMAA-Space/alexandria-backtranslated-pairs (348,787 synthetic pairs)
Dev (12,250 turns, 11 countries)	22.77 spBLEU · 38.71 chrF++
Internal hold-out (3,350 turns, 5% of train)	24.36 spBLEU · 40.16 chrF++
Blind test	not run (this system was not part of a submitted bundle)
Track	constrained (provided data only, ≤5B parameters)
License	CC-BY-NC-4.0 — check UBC-NLP/NileChat-3B-Base for the base model's terms

Usage

The adapter was trained on one exact prompt format, with the conversation history filled in. Reproduce it character-for-character, and feed back the model's own previous translations turn by turn — that is how it was trained and how it was scored.

import torch
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM, BitsAndBytesConfig
from peft import PeftModel

BASE = "UBC-NLP/NileChat-3B-Base"
ADAPTER = "NAMAA-Space/alexandriax-nilechat-ctx-aux"

bnb = BitsAndBytesConfig(load_in_4bit=True, bnb_4bit_quant_type="nf4",
                         bnb_4bit_use_double_quant=True,
                         bnb_4bit_compute_dtype=torch.bfloat16)

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(BASE, trust_remote_code=True)
tok.padding_side = "left"
if tok.pad_token is None:
    tok.pad_token = tok.eos_token

base = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(BASE, quantization_config=bnb,
                                            device_map="auto", trust_remote_code=True)
model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(base, ADAPTER).eval()


def format_history(history):
    """history: list of {"speaker", "sentence", "translation"} for previous turns."""
    if not history:
        return "No previous turns (Start of conversation)."
    return "\n".join(f"{h.get('speaker') or 'Speaker'}: {h['sentence']}\n"
                     f"Translation: {h['translation']}" for h in history)


def build_prompt(dialect, country, domain, participants, speaker, direction, sentence,
                 history=None):
    return (f"You are an expert translator. Translate the English sentence into {dialect}.\n\n"
            f"### Metadata:\n- Country: {country}\n- Domain: {domain}\n"
            f"- Participants: {participants}\n- Speaker: {speaker}\n"
            f"- Speaker Direction: {direction}\n\n"
            f"### Conversation History:\n{format_history(history)}\n\n"
            f"### Sentence to Translate:\n{sentence.strip()}\n\n### Translation:\n")


def clean_generation(text):
    text = text.strip()
    for marker in ("\n###", "### Sentence to Translate:", "### Translation:"):
        if marker in text:
            text = text.split(marker, 1)[0].strip()
    return text


def translate_conversation(turns, **meta):
    """turns: list of {"speaker", "direction", "sentence"} in turn order."""
    history, out = [], []
    for t in turns:
        prompt = build_prompt(sentence=t["sentence"], speaker=t["speaker"],
                              direction=t["direction"], history=history, **meta)
        enc = tok([prompt], return_tensors="pt", padding=True, truncation=True,
                  max_length=1024).to(model.device)
        with torch.no_grad():
            gen = model.generate(**enc, max_new_tokens=128, do_sample=False)
        pred = clean_generation(
            tok.decode(gen[0][enc["input_ids"].shape[1]:], skip_special_tokens=True))
        out.append(pred)
        history.append({"speaker": t["speaker"], "sentence": t["sentence"],
                        "translation": pred})      # the model's own output, not gold
    return out


print(translate_conversation(
    [{"speaker": "Wholesale Buyer", "direction": "male -> female",
      "sentence": "Good morning. How much for the whole quantity?"},
     {"speaker": "Farmer", "direction": "female -> male",
      "sentence": "For you, a special price. Eight pounds a kilo."}],
    dialect="Egyptian Arabic (Cairene) Dialect", country="EG",
    domain="Agriculture and farming",
    participants="Wholesale Buyer, Wholesale Seller"))

Reference decoding for every number in this card: greedy (do_sample=False), max_new_tokens=128, prompt truncated at 1024 tokens, left-padded batches.

Never place gold previous-turn Arabic in the history block when measuring. An earlier harness in this project did, and it inflated held-out scores by roughly +2.4 spBLEU. Every number in this card comes from the corrected, self-conditioned harness.

Intended use

Research on data augmentation for low-resource dialectal MT — specifically as the evidence that NLLB-generated back-translation into Arabic dialects does not transfer to this task's reference style. Not for production translation without human review.

---

The shared task

AlexandriaX-2026 (ArabicNLP 2026 / EMNLP) — Context-Aware Dialectal Arabic MT and MT Evaluation. This model was built for Subtask 1: Context-Aware English-to-Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation.

Given one English dialogue turn together with its conversation history and metadata — target country/dialect, domain, participant roles, speaker, and speaker→addressee gender direction — the system must produce the turn in the requested country's spoken Arabic, preserving meaning while adapting lexical, morphological, pragmatic and sociolinguistic choices to that variety.

Two tracks: constrained (provided data only, ≤5B parameters) and unconstrained (any external data or model). Ranking is by spBLEU (primary) and chrF++ (secondary), each macro-averaged over countries.

Official data (UBC-NLP/alexandria)

Split sizes in turns, as published by the organisers:

Split	EG	JO	LB	LY	MA	MR	OM	PS	SA	SD	SY	TN	YE	Total
train	3,108	5,501	8,906	0	2,573	5,515	6,280	14,933	8,470	0	6,071	2,034	3,089	66,480
dev	1,113	1,113	1,118	0	1,110	1,114	1,109	1,110	1,110	0	1,119	1,116	1,118	12,250
public test	1,118	1,107	1,106	1,109	1,115	1,112	1,118	1,109	1,113	1,106	1,114	1,109	1,106	14,442
private (blind) test	1,113	1,109	1,110	1,309	1,111	1,119	1,107	1,111	1,114	915	1,114	1,114	1,113	14,459

Libyan (LY) and Sudanese (SD) appear only at test time — they are zero-shot for every system trained on this data.

Conversation-level counts: 21,146 train / 3,963 dev / 4,706 public-test conversations; mean 3.13 turns per conversation (range 1–5). Mean length 102 characters of English source, 74 characters of dialectal target.

Dialects (13 countries). Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Libyan, Moroccan, Mauritanian, Omani, Palestinian, Saudi, Sudanese, Syrian, Tunisian, Yemeni. Labels are country + sub-dialect, and several countries carry more than one: Palestinian 10 (Nabulsi and Albira urban, plus Falahi varieties of Surif, Kobar, Noba, Ni'lin, Shuqba, Aboud, Silwad, Ramallah), Omani 5 (Suri, Rustaqi, Al-Wafi, Ibri, Seebi), Saudi 3 (Southern, Hijazi, Khaleeji), Yemeni 3 (Taiz, San'ani, Central), Syrian 2 (Levantine Standard, Homsi). The remaining countries carry one label each (e.g. Egyptian Arabic (Cairene), Moroccan Standard Darija, Mauritanian Hassaniya, Libyan Arabic (Misrati/Central)).

Domains (11, near-uniform). Agriculture and farming, Commerce and transactions, Construction and real estate, Education and academia, Energy and resources, Everyday and social, Healthcare and medical, Legal and financial, Logistics and transportation, Professional and workplace, Tourism and hospitality.

Speaker direction (turns, train+dev+public test): female→male 30,636 · male→female 30,203 · male→male 20,465 · female→female 11,868. The corpus carries 76 distinct translator IDs and 44 reviewer IDs.

Code-switching in the gold is strongly dialect-specific — the share of gold turns containing Latin characters runs from TN 39.1% / MA 33.8% / LB 18.1% down to SY 1.2% / YE 0.8%. Systems that normalise every borrowing into Arabic script are penalised hardest on Maghrebi references (see Known limitations).

Evaluation protocol

• spBLEU — sacrebleu.BLEU(tokenize="flores200"), corpus-level per country, then averaged over countries.
• chrF++ — sacrebleu.CHRF(word_order=2), same averaging.
• Decoding is turn-by-turn: at turn n the conversation history contains the system's own previous outputs, never the gold ones. (An early evaluation harness in this project leaked gold previous-turn Arabic into the prompt and inflated scores by ≈2.4 spBLEU; every number reported here comes from the corrected, self-conditioned harness.)

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Training data

Two sources, concatenated into one supervised mixture of 411,917 examples:

Source	Examples	Share	What it is
Official Subtask-1 train (context prompts)	63,130	15.3%	human-translated dialogue turns, 11 countries, history filled with the previous turns
alexandria-backtranslated-pairs	348,787	84.7%	synthetic single-turn pairs, 14 varieties, history always empty

Real data, per country (turns):

PS	LB	SA	OM	SY	MR	JO	YE	EG	MA	TN
14,183	8,464	8,035	5,965	5,760	5,234	5,224	2,946	2,943	2,443	1,933

Synthetic data, per country (pairs):

SA	SY	MA	PS	DZ	EG	LB	JO	TN	OM	LY	SD	YE	MR
50,000	50,000	46,286	30,538	30,078	28,197	23,467	21,185	15,204	13,812	13,587	12,251	12,031	2,151

The synthetic side is the one place where LY, SD and Algerian (DZ, not a task variety) get any training signal at all — 13,587 and 12,251 pairs for the two zero-shot test varieties.

How the synthetic pairs were made. A monolingual corpus of 358,483 cleaned dialectal sentences was assembled from public sources — IADD, QADI, NADI-2021, MADAR, and Egyptian, Saudi, Moroccan, Levantine, Libyan, Sudanese and Yemeni web and transcript collections (transcript columns only; no audio was ingested). URLs, mentions, hashtags, timestamps and emoji were stripped, all Latin letters deleted, punctuation blanked, character runs collapsed, length clipped to 3–1000 characters and near-duplicates removed. Each surviving sentence was back-translated to English with facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M (fp16, greedy, 128 new tokens, batch 256, capped at 50,000 sentences per variety) and the pair inverted into the training prompt, yielding 348,787 English→dialect pairs. Full parameters and the build script are in the dataset card.

Two filter choices deserve flagging in hindsight. Latin script is deleted, so no synthetic target contains a single Latin token — while 33.8% of Moroccan and 39.1% of Tunisian gold turns do. And punctuation is stripped from the targets but not from the English prompts. Both push the model away from the reference style of exactly the varieties the augmentation was meant to help.

Training procedure — every hyperparameter

Extracted verbatim from AlexandriaX_NB2_Finetune.ipynb. Runnable single-file version, which reproduces all three variants behind one --variant flag: train_nilechat_qlora.py.

python train_nilechat_qlora.py --variant ctx_aux --out ./runs/nilechat_ctx_aux

Every setting below is identical to the context-free sibling except the training mixture and therefore the step count — that is what makes this an ablation rather than a different system.

Model, adapter and data

Setting	Value	Note
Base model	UBC-NLP/NileChat-3B-Base	decoder-only; the organisers' baseline model
Regime	QLoRA	4-bit frozen base + LoRA adapters, SFT via TRL's SFTTrainer
LoRA rank r	16
LoRA alpha	32	scaling 32/16 = 2
LoRA dropout	0.05
LoRA bias	"none"
task_type	CAUSAL_LM
target_modules	"all-linear"	resolved to q_proj, k_proj, v_proj, o_proj, gate_proj, up_proj, down_proj
Trainable parameters	≈30M (~1% of the base)	119.8 MB adapter
Loss	completion-only (completion_only_loss=True)	the prompt is masked out of the loss
Data schema	{"prompt": ..., "completion": response + eos_token}	TRL prompt/completion format
max_length	1024 tokens	matters more here: context prompts are longer
packing	False
Training examples	411,917	63,130 real (with history) + 348,787 back-translated
Mixture handling	plain concatenation, then shuffle	no curriculum, upsampling or loss reweighting
padding_side	right for training, left for generation

Quantisation

Setting	Value
load_in_4bit	True
bnb_4bit_quant_type	nf4
bnb_4bit_use_double_quant	True
bnb_4bit_compute_dtype	bfloat16 (fp16 fallback)
device_map	"auto"
prepare_model_for_kbit_training	called before attaching LoRA

Optimisation

Setting	Value	Note
Optimiser	paged_adamw_8bit
Learning rate	2e-4
LR scheduler	cosine	over 6.4k steps here, 987 for the context-free sibling
Warmup	warmup_ratio=0.03	ratio, so ≈193 steps here against ≈30 there
Epochs	1	over the full mixture
per_device_train_batch_size	32
gradient_accumulation_steps	2
Effective batch	64
Optimiser steps	≈6,436	411,917 / 64 — 6.5× the sibling's
Weight decay / clipping	0.0 / 1.0	framework defaults

The step count is a confound worth naming: this variant takes 6.5× as many optimiser steps as the context-free sibling it is compared against, because "one epoch" is defined over a 6.5× larger mixture. The comparison is therefore equal-epoch, not equal-step.

Precision, memory, hardware

Setting	Value
Hardware	1 × A100-80GB
bf16 / fp16	bf16 True (fp16 as fallback)
Attention	FlashAttention-2 when the load succeeds, else the default implementation
gradient_checkpointing	True
use_cache	False during training, True for generation

Bookkeeping

Setting	Value
logging_steps / save_steps / save_total_limit	20 / 200 / 2
Resume	automatic from the highest checkpoint-*
Libraries	transformers, trl, peft 0.19.1, bitsandbytes

Inference (used for every score in this card)

Setting	Value
Decoding	greedy — do_sample=False, no beams
max_new_tokens	128
Prompt truncation	1024 tokens
Generation batch	up to 512, left-padded
Post-processing	split off anything after \n###, ### Sentence to Translate: or ### Translation:
Context	the model's own previous outputs, appended turn by turn

Training uses gold history, evaluation uses generated history. At training time the history block holds the gold previous turns (ordinary teacher forcing); at evaluation time it must hold the model's own previous outputs. Conflating the two inflated an early measurement in this project by roughly +2.4 spBLEU.

Results

The ablation this checkpoint belongs to

Three variants, identical hyperparameters, differing only in prompt history and training mixture. Both evaluation sets are decoded turn-by-turn with the model's own previous outputs as history.

Variant	History in prompt	Extra data	dev spBLEU	dev chrF++	hold-out spBLEU	hold-out chrF++
nilechat_noctx	none	—	23.54	39.68	24.84	40.36
nilechat_ctx	own previous turns	—	22.87	39.11	23.37	39.35
nilechat_ctx_aux (this model)	own previous turns	348,787 back-translated pairs	22.77	38.71	24.36	40.16

dev = official 12,250-turn development set, 11 countries. hold-out = the team's internal 3,350-turn split of the training conversations.

The two sets disagree, and this is the crux of the card. On the internal hold-out, back-translation looks like a clear win over the context variant (+0.99 spBLEU, 24.36 vs 23.37) and nearly catches the context-free model. On the official development set the same comparison reverses — −0.10 spBLEU and −0.40 chrF++ against the context variant — and the gap to the context-free model widens to −0.77 spBLEU. The internal split shares conversations, speakers and phrasing with the training data; the official dev set does not. Trust the official dev column — and, more generally, do not size an augmentation decision on a hold-out carved from the training conversations.

Per-country, official dev set (12,250 turns)

	EG	JO	LB	MA	MR	OM	PS	SA	SY	TN	YE	macro
spBLEU	26.90	29.03	25.21	15.90	9.31	22.29	25.32	25.99	29.54	22.67	18.32	22.77
chrF++	41.51	44.26	40.75	31.67	26.47	39.06	41.12	42.05	45.88	37.90	35.12	38.71

Per-country, internal hold-out (3,350 turns)

	EG	JO	LB	MA	MR	OM	PS	SA	SY	TN	YE	macro
spBLEU	24.75	29.99	25.58	19.15	14.08	22.68	25.84	30.56	31.17	26.27	17.89	24.36
chrF++	39.75	45.52	41.03	35.30	30.72	39.82	41.78	46.05	47.28	39.70	34.76	40.16

Where the augmentation actually moved things

Against the context-only variant on official dev, adding 348k synthetic pairs helped Egyptian (+0.34), Tunisian (+1.42) and Omani (+0.87) and hurt Moroccan (−0.82), Syrian (−0.93), Palestinian (−0.83) and Saudi (−0.84). The two countries that gained most are among the scarcest in real data; the ones that lost most are among the best resourced, where synthetic noise displaces good supervision. The net is roughly flat, which is the honest summary: NLLB back-translation into Arabic dialects buys little here and costs where real data is already plentiful.

Known limitations

• Negative result. Do not pick this checkpoint expecting the augmentation to help; pick the context-free sibling for quality, and this one to study or extend the augmentation.
• Synthetic-heavy mixture. 84.7% of the training examples are machine-generated, all single-turn with empty history, which dilutes the context signal the variant was meant to exploit.
• Latin-script deletion fights the references on exactly the code-switching varieties (MA, TN, LB) that most needed help, and punctuation stripping costs character-level credit everywhere — see the note above.
• Back-translation direction is untested. The English side comes from NLLB and is not human-verified; some of it is visibly disfluent, and the corpus includes informal web text whose register differs from the task's role-play dialogues.
• DZ (Algerian) is in the synthetic data but not in the task, so approximately 8.6% of the mixture targets a variety that is never evaluated.
• Prompt-format sensitivity: trained on exactly one template with completion-only loss.
• LY and SD get synthetic-only supervision; their blind-test behaviour was never measured for this checkpoint.
• Not evaluated on the blind test; metric-only evaluation (no human, no COMET).
• Base-model licence and usage terms apply; check UBC-NLP/NileChat-3B-Base.

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Where this model sits in the NAMAA system

All Subtask-1 systems built by the team, scored on the official 12,250-turn dev set (11 countries) and, where they were run, on the 14,459-turn private blind test (13 countries). Country-macro spBLEU / chrF++.

System	Params / arch.	dev spBLEU	dev chrF++	blind spBLEU	blind chrF++	Released
Gemma, beam search (submitted, constrained)	~3.1B, dec-only	—	—	27.413	42.58	no
Routed ensemble (submitted, unconstrained)	—	—	—	27.412	43.05	n/a
Gemini 2.5 Flash, 5-shot	API	—	—	26.68	42.49	n/a
Claude Sonnet 4.5, 5-shot	API	—	—	26.36	42.26	n/a
AraT5v2 full fine-tune	368M, enc–dec	25.12	40.66	23.26	39.03	alexandriax-arat5v2-base
Qwen2.5-1.5B LoRA	1.5B, dec-only	23.71	40.51	21.24	38.06	no
NileChat-3B QLoRA, context-free	3B, dec-only	23.54	39.68	—	—	alexandriax-nilechat-lora
NileChat-3B QLoRA, +context	3B, dec-only	22.87	39.11	—	—	no
NileChat-3B QLoRA, +context +back-translation	3B, dec-only	22.77	38.71	—	—	alexandriax-nilechat-ctx-aux
Gemma-3-1B LoRA	1B, dec-only	22.71	38.86	20.09	36.20	no
NLLB-200-1.3B QLoRA	1.3B, enc–dec	21.83	38.13	—	—	alexandriax-nllb-1.3b-lora
AraT5v2, dialect-rebalanced	368M, enc–dec	void run¹		—	—	alexandriax-arat5v2-balanced
mT5-large, dialect-rebalanced	1.23B, enc–dec	not evaluated²		—	—	alexandriax-mt5-large-balanced
MBR over 3 NileChat variants	—	23.57	39.86	—	—	n/a
MBR over 5 samples, one model	—	20.09	37.50	—	—	n/a
Linear adapter merge	—	19.90	35.33	—	—	n/a

¹ That run was trained against destroyed targets — a tokenizer fallback substituted t5-base (32,100 English tokens) for AraT5v2's 110,208-token vocabulary, so every Arabic character became <unk>. It scored 0.00 spBLEU and cannot be recovered without retraining; the post-mortem and a fixed training script are in its card.

² That run stopped at step 2,500 of a planned 31,568 (epoch 0.63 of 8) and was never decoded on the development set, so no score exists for it. Its card carries the full recovered configuration.

Two findings from this bank of models are worth carrying elsewhere.

1. Parameter count does not predict rank below the cap. The 368M encoder–decoder AraT5v2 beats every larger decoder-only fine-tune on identical data, and among the decoder-only models spBLEU falls Qwen2.5-1.5B > NileChat-3B > Gemma-3-1B — the reverse of their size order. A reading consistent with this: the metric rewards fidelity to the annotators' conventions over generative fluency. A translator fine-tuned on the provided targets acquires those conventions; a decoder-only model several times its size contributes fluency n-gram overlap does not credit.
2. Combination is not free. Fitted and evaluated on disjoint halves of the dev conversations: routing per country +0.07, per country + sub-dialect +0.28, per country + domain −0.32, MBR consensus over 5 systems −0.57, MBR over the top-2 per dialect −0.81 — against a best single system of 24.98. The per-turn oracle reaches 32.25 (+7.27), so the right output is usually in the pool and the failure is in selection: three NileChat variants agree with one another and outvote the single strongest system, so consensus weights model-family size rather than quality. The submitted system therefore routes per dialect under a ±0.40 spBLEU margin guard instead of voting.

---

The collection

All released artefacts live in NAMAA at AlexandriaX-2026:

Repo	What it is
alexandriax-arat5v2-base	AraT5v2-base full fine-tune — best small fine-tune, 25.12 dev / 23.26 blind spBLEU
alexandriax-arat5v2-balanced	the same recipe on a temperature-rebalanced dialect mixture — void run, released for the post-mortem and the fixed script
alexandriax-nilechat-lora	NileChat-3B QLoRA, context-free — best of the three NileChat variants, 23.54 dev spBLEU
alexandriax-nilechat-ctx-aux	NileChat-3B QLoRA, context + back-translation — the augmentation ablation, 22.77 dev spBLEU
alexandriax-nllb-1.3b-lora	NLLB-200-1.3B QLoRA with per-dialect language codes, 21.83 dev spBLEU
alexandriax-mt5-large-balanced	mT5-large on the rebalanced mixture — partial run (2,500/31,568 steps), never evaluated
alexandria-backtranslated-pairs	348,787 synthetic EN→dialect pairs over 14 varieties

Every model repo above carries a single-file train_*.py reproduction script with the exact hyperparameters that produced its checkpoint; the dataset repo carries build_backtranslated_pairs.py.

Official task data: UBC-NLP/alexandria. Base models: UBC-NLP/AraT5v2-base-1024, UBC-NLP/NileChat-3B-Base, facebook/nllb-200-1.3B, google/mt5-large.

---

Team

NAMAA Community — Fatimah Emad Eldin (Cairo University) · Omer Nacar (Tuwaiq Academy) · Khloud Al Jallad (Arab International University) · Mona Abdelazim (Ain Shams University).

Citation

Coming soon. The NAMAA system-description paper for AlexandriaX-2026 is under review for the ArabicNLP 2026 (EMNLP) proceedings; this card will be updated with the final ACL Anthology reference and DOI when the proceedings are published. Until then, please cite as:

@inproceedings{namaa-alexandriax-2026,
  title     = {{NAMAA} Community at {AlexandriaX-2026}: Prompting, Fine-Tuning and Agreement
               Voting for Dialectal Arabic Translation and Evaluation},
  author    = {Emad Eldin, Fatimah and Nacar, Omer and Al Jallad, Khloud and Abdelazim, Mona},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
               (ArabicNLP 2026)},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {To appear. Citation coming soon.}
}

Please also cite the shared task and the base model:

@inproceedings{alexandriax2026,
  title     = {{AlexandriaX-2026} Shared Task: Context-Aware Dialectal Arabic Machine
               Translation and MT Evaluation},
  author    = {El Mekki, Abdellah and Elmadany, AbdelRahim A. and Magdy, Samar M. and
               Ezzini, Saad and El-Haj, Mo and Jarrar, Mustafa and El-Beltagy, Samhaa and
               Abbas, Mourad and Zaraket, Fadi and Al Mandhari, Salim and Alyafeai, Zaid and
               Ghanem, Bernard and Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
               (ArabicNLP 2026)},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {Overview paper. Citation coming soon.}
}

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the AlexandriaX-2026 organisers for the data, the evaluation infrastructure and their responsiveness during the evaluation phases.