Bridging the Gap: Fusing CNNs and Transformers to Decode the Elegance of Handwritten Arabic Script

Handwritten Arabic script recognition is a challenging task due to the script's dynamic letter forms and contextual variations. This paper proposes a hybrid approach combining convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer-based architectures to address these complexities. We evaluated custom and fine-tuned models, including EfficientNet-B7 and Vision Transformer (ViT-B16), and introduced an ensemble model that leverages confidence-based fusion to integrate their strengths. Our ensemble achieves remarkable performance on the IFN/ENIT dataset, with 96.38% accuracy for letter classification and 97.22% for positional classification. The results highlight the complementary nature of CNNs and Transformers, demonstrating their combined potential for robust Arabic handwriting recognition. This work advances OCR systems, offering a scalable solution for real-world applications.

dzNLP at NADI 2024 Shared Task: Multi-Classifier Ensemble with Weighted Voting and TF-IDF Features

This paper presents the contribution of our dzNLP team to the NADI 2024 shared task, specifically in Subtask 1 - Multi-label Country-level Dialect Identification (MLDID) (Closed Track). We explored various configurations to address the challenge: in Experiment 1, we utilized a union of n-gram analyzers (word, character, character with word boundaries) with different n-gram values; in Experiment 2, we combined a weighted union of Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) features with various weights; and in Experiment 3, we implemented a weighted major voting scheme using three classifiers: Linear Support Vector Classifier (LSVC), Random Forest (RF), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). Our approach, despite its simplicity and reliance on traditional machine learning techniques, demonstrated competitive performance in terms of F1-score and precision. Notably, we achieved the highest precision score of 63.22% among the participating teams. However, our overall F1 score was approximately 21%, significantly impacted by a low recall rate of 12.87%. This indicates that while our models were highly precise, they struggled to recall a broad range of dialect labels, highlighting a critical area for improvement in handling diverse dialectal variations.