Team Alexa at NADI Shared Task

AbstractIn this paper, we discuss our team’s work on the NADI Shared Task. The task requires classifying Arabic tweets among 21 dialects. We tested out different approaches, and the best one was the simplest one. Our best submission was using Multinational Naive Bayes (MNB) classifier (Small and Hsiao, 1985) with n-grams as features. Despite its simplicity, this classifier shows better results than complicated models such as BERT. Our best submitted score was 17% F1-score and 35% accuracy.