Emhotob-5M-Darija-MSA-v1 — Bidirectional Darija ↔ MSA (~5M params)
A 5.08M-parameter model that translates both ways between Moroccan Darija
(الدارجة المغربية) and Modern Standard Arabic (الفصحى). A single set of weights serves
both directions; a direction-specific Arabic system prompt selects which way to translate.
Finetuned from
oddadmix/Emhotob-5M,
a tiny Llama-architecture base (hidden size 128, 5 layers, 4 heads, tied embeddings).
Scaling study. This runs the exact recipe of
oddadmix/50M-Darija-MSA-v1 on a base
~10× smaller. At 5M the model
switches script/register correctly and is the strongest of
the 5M translation set (MSA→Darija BLEU ~13), though it still drifts on longer inputs. A
scaling demonstration, not a production translator; use the 50M sibling for fluent output.
Evaluation
Evaluated on a deterministic held-out set of ~3,000 pairs (seed=42; 2,961 scored after
dropping rows with an empty MSA reference), decoded greedily (do_sample=False, no
repetition penalty), scored with sacreBLEU:
| Direction | sacreBLEU | chrF |
|---|
| Darija → MSA | 5.81 | 20.28 |
| MSA → Darija | 13.16 | 21.59 |
MSA→Darija scores highest of any direction in the 5M suite. The saved weights are the best
checkpoint by validation loss (eval_loss = 3.512, epoch 3 of 3). For reference, the 50M
sibling scores BLEU ~32 (dar→msa) / ~40 (msa→dar) with the same data and eval.
Example translations
Real greedy-decoded outputs from the held-out set (rough — this is a 5M model):
Darija → MSA
| Darija input | Model output (MSA) | Reference |
|---|
| لا، عندنا تذاكر يا حبيبة | لا، أنا لا أحب ذلك. | لا، لدينا تذاكر يا حبيبتي. |
MSA → Darija
| MSA input | Model output (Darija) | Reference |
|---|
| لا، لدينا تذاكر يا حبيبتي. | لا، غادي نديرو | لا، عندنا تذاكر يا حبيبة |
| أنا أنتظر منك أن تستحق هذا. | كانضن غادي ندير | كانتسنّا فيك ت دي هادشي و تستاهلو |
The model produces authentic Darija markers (
غادي,
كانضن,
هادشي) in the MSA→Darija
direction and MSA morphology the other way, but frequently loses source content. 20 samples per
direction with references are in
eval_bidirectional.json.
Usage
ChatML format. Pick the system prompt for the direction you want:
1import torch
2from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
3
4model_id = "oddadmix/Emhotob-5M-Darija-MSA-v1"
5tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
6model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_id, dtype=torch.bfloat16).to("cuda").eval()
7
8SYS_TO_MSA = "أنت مترجم محترف. ترجم النص من الدارجة المغربية إلى اللغة العربية الفصحى."
9SYS_TO_DAR = "أنت مترجم محترف. ترجم النص من اللغة العربية الفصحى إلى الدارجة المغربية."
10
11def translate(text: str, system: str) -> str:
12 prompt = (
13 f"<|im_start|>system\n{system}<|im_end|>\n"
14 f"<|im_start|>user\n{text.strip()}<|im_end|>\n"
15 f"<|im_start|>assistant\n"
16 )
17 ids = tok(prompt, return_tensors="pt", add_special_tokens=False).to(model.device)
18 if tok.bos_token_id is not None: # training prepends BOS
19 bos = torch.tensor([[tok.bos_token_id]], device=model.device)
20 ids["input_ids"] = torch.cat([bos, ids["input_ids"]], dim=1)
21 ids["attention_mask"] = torch.cat([torch.ones_like(bos), ids["attention_mask"]], dim=1)
22 out = model.generate(**ids, max_new_tokens=256, do_sample=False,
23 eos_token_id=tok.eos_token_id, pad_token_id=tok.pad_token_id)
24 return tok.decode(out[0, ids["input_ids"].size(1):], skip_special_tokens=True).strip()
25
26print(translate("لا، لدينا تذاكر يا حبيبتي.", SYS_TO_DAR))
Training
- Base model:
oddadmix/Emhotob-5M (Llama arch, hidden 128, 5 layers, 4 heads, vocab 32000,
tied embeddings; 5,080,704 params after resizing for 2 ChatML tokens)
- Dataset:
oddadmix/darija_english_msa_parallel_dataset (90,104 rows; this model uses the
darija and msa columns; rows with an empty msa are skipped). Sources: DoDA, HANTIFARAH
combined, and ArabML/Skiredj parallel data.
- Method: HuggingFace
Trainer, ChatML, prompt-masked cross-entropy (loss only on the
assistant turn). Each row is exploded into two training examples (one per direction).
Two ChatML special tokens (<|im_start|>, <|im_end|>) were added and embeddings resized.
- Hyperparameters: 3 epochs · effective batch 64 · LR 3e-4 (cosine, 5% warmup) ·
bf16 · max length 1024 ·
load_best_model_at_end on eval_loss.
- Split: 87,104 train / 3,000 deterministic held-out (
seed=42), scored both directions.
Limitations
- A 5M model near the emergence threshold: correct register/script but frequent meaning loss,
drift, and repetition on longer inputs.
- Darija has no standard orthography and mixes Arabic and Latin (Arabizi) script plus
French/Amazigh loanwords — outputs vary in spelling and may hallucinate on out-of-domain input.
- For fluent translation use
oddadmix/50M-Darija-MSA-v1.
License
Apache-2.0 (model weights, inherited from the base model). The training dataset aggregates
several community corpora — check their individual licenses for downstream use.