The QALB-2014 shared task focuses on correcting errors in texts written in Modern Standard Arabic. In this paper, we describe the Columbia University entry in the shared task. Our system consists of several components that rely on machinelearning techniques and linguistic knowledge. We submitted three versions of the system: these share several core elements but each version also includes additional components. We describe our underlying approach and the special aspects of the different versions of our submission. Our system ranked first out of nine participating teams.

In this paper we study the use of sentencelevel dialect identification in optimizing machine translation system selection when translating mixed dialect input. We test our approach on Arabic, a prototypical diglossic language; and we optimize the combination of four different machine translation systems. Our best result improves over the best single MT system baseline by 1.0% BLEU and over a strong system selection baseline by 0.6% BLEU on a blind test set.

While Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has many resources, Arabic Dialects, the primarily spoken local varieties of Arabic, are quite impoverished in this regard. In this article, we present ADAM (Analyzer for Dialectal Arabic Morphology). ADAM is a poor man's solution to quickly develop morphological analyzers for dialectal Arabic. ADAM has roughly half the outof-vocabulary rate of a state-of-the-art MSA analyzer and is comparable in its recall performance to an Egyptian dialectal morphological analyzer that took years and expensive resources to build. Ó 2014 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).

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In clinical dictation, speakers try to be as concise as possible to save time, often resulting in utterances without explicit punctuation commands. Since the end product of a dictated report, e.g. an out-patient letter, does require correct orthography, including exact punctuation, the latter need to be restored, preferably by automated means. This paper describes a method for punctuation restoration based on a stateof-the-art stack of NLP and machine learning techniques including B-RNNs with an attention mechanism and late fusion, as well as a feature extraction technique tailored to the processing of medical terminology using a novel vocabulary reduction model. To the best of our knowledge, the resulting performance is superior to that reported in prior art on similar tasks.