Pirates at ArabicNLU2024: Enhancing Arabic Word Sense Disambiguation using Transformer-Based Approaches

AbstractThis paper presents a novel approach to Ara-bic Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) lever-aging transformer-based models to tackle thecomplexities of the Arabic language. Utiliz-ing the SALMA dataset, we applied severaltechniques, including Sentence Transformerswith Siamese networks and the SetFit frame-work optimized for few-shot learning. Our ex-periments, structured around a robust evalua-tion framework, achieved a promising F1-scoreof up to 71%, securing second place in theArabicNLU 2024: The First Arabic NaturalLanguage Understanding Shared Task compe-tition. These results demonstrate the efficacyof our approach, especially in dealing with thechallenges posed by homophones, homographs,and the lack of diacritics in Arabic texts. Theproposed methods significantly outperformedtraditional WSD techniques, highlighting theirpotential to enhance the accuracy of Arabicnatural language processing applications.