This paper discusses a new metric that has been applied to verify the quality in translation between sentence pairs in parallel corpora of Arabic-English. This metric combines two techniques, one based on sentence length and the other based on compression code length. Experiments on sample test parallel Arabic-English corpora indicate the combination of these two techniques improves accuracy of the identification of satisfactory and unsatisfactory sentence pairs compared to sentence length and compression code length alone. The new method proposed in this research is effective at filtering noise and reducing mis-translations resulting in greatly improved quality.
The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) has developed hundreds of data corpora for natural language processing (NLP) research. Among these are a number of annotated treebank corpora for Arabic. Typically, these corpora consist of a single collection of annotated documents. NLP research, however, usually requires multiple data sets for the purposes of training models, developing techniques, and final evaluation. Therefore it becomes necessary to divide the corpora used into the required data sets (divisions). This document details a set of rules that have been defined to enable consistent division…
The availability of corpora is a major factor in building natural language processing applications. However, the costs of acquiring corpora can prevent some researchers from going further in their endeavours. The ease of access to freely available corpora is urgent needed in the NLP research community especially for language such as Arabic. Currently, there is not easy was to access to a comprehensive and updated list of freely available Arabic corpora. We present in this paper, the results of a recent survey conducted to identify the list of the freely available Arabic corpora and language re…
In this paper, we present an ongoing effort in lexical semantic analysis and annotation of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) text, a semi automatic annotation tool concerned with the morphologic, syntactic, and semantic levels of description.
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；University of Bahrain（巴林大学）
Most Arabic natural language processing tools and resources are developed to serve Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is the official written language in the Arab World. Some Dialectal Arabic varieties, notably Egyptian Arabic, have received some attention lately and have a growing collection of resources that include annotated corpora and morphological analyzers and taggers. Gulf Arabic, however, lags behind in that respect. In this paper, we present the Gumar Corpus, a large-scale corpus of Gulf Arabic consisting of 110 million words from 1,200 forum novels. We annotate the corpus for sub-d…
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；University of Rhode Island（罗德岛大学）；Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Dicta: The Israel Center for Text Analysis（Dicta：以色列文本分析中心）
Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a rich and long history spanning more than fourteen centuries. Yet existing Arabic corpora largely focus on the modern period or lack sufficient diachronic information. We develop a large-scale, historical corpus of Arabic of about 1 billion words from diverse periods of time. We clean this corpus, process it with a morphological analyzer, and enhance it by detecting parallel passages and automatically dating undated texts. We demonstrate its utility with selected case-studies in which we show its application to the digital humanities.
The preprocessing phase is one of the key phases within the text classification pipeline. This study aims at investigating the impact of the preprocessing phase on text classification, specifically on offensive language and hate speech classification for Arabic text. The Arabic language used in social media is informal and written using Arabic dialects, which makes the text classification task very complex. Preprocessing helps in dimensionality reduction and removing useless content. We apply intensive preprocessing techniques to the dataset before processing it further and feeding it into the…
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；University of Rhode Island（罗德岛大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Dicta: The Israel Center for Text Analysis（以色列文本分析中心（Dicta））；University of Vienna（维也纳大学）
Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a long and rich history, but existing corpora and language technology focus mostly on modern Arabic and its varieties. Therefore, studying the history of the language has so far been mostly limited to manual analyses on a small scale. In this work, we present a large-scale historical corpus of the written Arabic language, spanning 1400 years. We describe our efforts to clean and process this corpus using Arabic NLP tools, including the identification of reused text. We study the history of the Arabic language using a novel automatic periodization algorit…
USTHB University（USTHB大学）；University of Salford（索尔福德大学）
In this paper, we make freely accessible ANETAC our English-Arabic named entity transliteration and classification dataset that we built from freely available parallel translation corpora. The dataset contains 79,924 instances, each instance is a triplet (e, a, c), where e is the English named entity, a is its Arabic transliteration and c is its class that can be either a Person, a Location, or an Organization. The ANETAC dataset is mainly aimed for the researchers that are working on Arabic named entity transliteration, but it can also be used for named entity classification purposes.
At present, Text-to-speech (TTS) systems that are trained with high-quality transcribed speech data using end-to-end neural models can generate speech that is intelligible, natural, and closely resembles human speech. These models are trained with relatively large single-speaker professionally recorded audio, typically extracted from audiobooks. Meanwhile, due to the scarcity of freely available speech corpora of this kind, a larger gap exists in Arabic TTS research and development. Most of the existing freely available Arabic speech corpora are not suitable for TTS training as they contain mu…
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
Machine translation between Arabic and Hebrew has so far been limited by a lack of parallel corpora, despite the political and cultural importance of this language pair. Previous work relied on manually-crafted grammars or pivoting via English, both of which are unsatisfactory for building a scalable and accurate MT system. In this work, we compare standard phrase-based and neural systems on Arabic-Hebrew translation. We experiment with tokenization by external tools and sub-word modeling by character-level neural models, and show that both methods lead to improved translation performance, wit…
This paper proposes a methodology to prepare corpora in Arabic language from online social network (OSN) and review site for Sentiment Analysis (SA) task. The paper also proposes a methodology for generating a stopword list from the prepared corpora. The aim of the paper is to investigate the effect of removing stopwords on the SA task. The problem is that the stopwords lists generated before were on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) which is not the common language used in OSN. We have generated a stopword list of Egyptian dialect and a corpus-based list to be used with the OSN corpora. We compare…
Recent trends in NLP research have raised an interest in linguistic code-switching (CS); modern approaches have been proposed to solve a wide range of NLP tasks on multiple language pairs. Unfortunately, these proposed methods are hardly generalizable to different code-switched languages. In addition, it is unclear whether a model architecture is applicable for a different task while still being compatible with the code-switching setting. This is mainly because of the lack of a centralized benchmark and the sparse corpora that researchers employ based on their specific needs and interests. To …
Data and Web Science Research Group（数据与网络科学研究组）；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）
Recent work has shown that distributional word vector spaces often encode human biases like sexism or racism. In this work, we conduct an extensive analysis of biases in Arabic word embeddings by applying a range of recently introduced bias tests on a variety of embedding spaces induced from corpora in Arabic. We measure the presence of biases across several dimensions, namely: embedding models (Skip-Gram, CBOW, and FastText) and vector sizes, types of text (encyclopedic text, and news vs. user-generated content), dialects (Egyptian Arabic vs. Modern Standard Arabic), and time (diachronic anal…
University of Birzeit（比尔宰特大学）；American University of Beirut（贝鲁特美国大学）；United Nations（联合国）
This article presents morphologically-annotated Yemeni, Sudanese, Iraqi, and Libyan Arabic dialects Lisan corpora. Lisan features around 1.2 million tokens. We collected the content of the corpora from several social media platforms. The Yemeni corpus (~ 1.05M tokens) was collected automatically from Twitter. The corpora of the other three dialects (~ 50K tokens each) came manually from Facebook and YouTube posts and comments. Thirty five (35) annotators who are native speakers of the target dialects carried out the annotations. The annotators segemented all words in the four corpora into pref…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；SRI International（SRI国际研究所）；LinkedIn（领英）
Statistical machine translation for dialectal Arabic is characterized by a lack of data since data acquisition involves the transcription and translation of spoken language. In this study we develop techniques for extracting parallel data for one particular dialect of Arabic (Iraqi Arabic) from out-of-domain corpora in different dialects of Arabic or in Modern Standard Arabic. We compare two different data selection strategies (cross-entropy based and submodular selection) and demonstrate that a very small but highly targeted amount of found data can improve the performance of a baseline machi…
Many automatic translation works have been addressed between major European language pairs, by taking advantage of large scale parallel corpora, but very few research works are conducted on the Amharic-Arabic language pair due to its parallel data scarcity. Two Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are developed using Attention-based Encoder-Decoder architecture which is adapted from the open-source OpenNMT system. In order to perform the experiment, a small parallel Quranic text corpus is constructed by modifying the existi…
University of Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）；Birzeit University（比尔宰特大学）；American University of Beirut（贝鲁特美国大学）
The processing of the Arabic language is a complex field of research. This is due to many factors, including the complex and rich morphology of Arabic, its high degree of ambiguity, and the presence of several regional varieties that need to be processed while taking into account their unique characteristics. When its dialects are taken into account, this language pushes the limits of NLP to find solutions to problems posed by its inherent nature. It is a diglossic language; the standard language is used in formal settings and in education and is quite different from the vernacular languages s…
National Center for AI and Big Data Technology（国家人工智能与大数据技术中心）；King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST)（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王科技城（KACST））
In this paper, we present a recipe for building a good Arabic-English neural machine translation. We compare neural systems with traditional phrase-based systems using various parallel corpora including UN, ISI and Ummah. We also investigate the importance of special preprocessing of the Arabic script. The presented results are based on test sets from NIST MT 2005 and 2012. The best neural system produces a gain of +13 BLEU points compared to an equivalent simple phrase-based system in NIST MT12 test set. Unexpectedly, we find that tuning a model trained on the whole data using a small high qu…
As natural language processing systems become more widespread, it is necessary to address fairness issues in their implementation and deployment to ensure that their negative impacts on society are understood and minimized. However, there is limited work that studies fairness using a multilingual and intersectional framework or on downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce four multilingual Equity Evaluation Corpora, supplementary test sets designed to measure social biases, and a novel statistical framework for studying unisectional and intersectional social biases in natural language proc…
Extracting synonyms from dictionaries or corpora is gaining special attention as synonyms play an important role in improving NLP application performance. This paper presents a survey of the different approaches and trends used in automatically extracting the synonyms. These approaches can be divided into four main categories. The first approach is to find the Synonyms using a translation graph. The second approach is to discover new transition pairs such as (Arabic-English) (English-France) then (Arabic-France). The third approach is to construct new WordNets by exploring synonymy graphs, and…
We introduce Seshat, a new, simple and open-source software to efficiently manage annotations of speech corpora. The Seshat software allows users to easily customise and manage annotations of large audio corpora while ensuring compliance with the formatting and naming conventions of the annotated output files. In addition, it includes procedures for checking the content of annotations following specific rules that can be implemented in personalised parsers. Finally, we propose a double-annotation mode, for which Seshat computes automatically an associated inter-annotator agreement with the $γ$…
China Foreign Affairs University（外交学院）；Peking University（北京大学）
In this paper, to evaluate text coherence, we propose the paragraph ordering task as well as conducting sentence ordering. We collected four distinct corpora from different domains on which we investigate the adaptation of existing sentence ordering methods to a paragraph ordering task. We also compare the learnability and robustness of existing models by artificially creating mini datasets and noisy datasets respectively and verifying the efficiency of established models under these circumstances. Furthermore, we carry out human evaluation on the rearranged passages from two competitive model…
Kata.ai Research Team（Kata.ai研究团队）；Kumamoto University（熊本大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Universitas Indonesia（印度尼西亚大学）；Oracle Digital Assistant（甲骨文数字助手）；Brawijaya University（布拉维贾亚大学）
We release our synthetic parallel paraphrase corpus across 17 languages: Arabic, Catalan, Czech, German, English, Spanish, Estonian, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Dutch, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Our method relies only on monolingual data and a neural machine translation system to generate paraphrases, hence simple to apply. We generate multiple translation samples using beam search and choose the most lexically diverse pair according to their sentence BLEU. We compare our generated corpus with the \texttt{ParaBank2}. According to our evaluation, our synthetic …
Automatic Part-of-Speech Tagging of Arabic-English Dictionary Senses through WordNet
Computer Science, Faculty of Computers and Information, Giza, Egypt（计算机科学，计算机与信息学院，开罗，埃及）；EECE, Faculty of Engineering, Giza, Egypt（电子工程系，工程学院，开罗，埃及）；Arabic Language and Literatures, Faculty of Arts, Giza, Egypt（阿拉伯语言与文学，艺术学院，开罗，埃及）
Ecole nationale Supérieure d’Informatique（国立高等信息学院）；Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Appliquées（高等应用科学学院）；GEOLSemantics（GEOL语义公司）
A hybrid approach for the transliteration of Algerian Arabizi: A primary study In this paper, we present a hybrid approach for the transliteration of the Algerian Arabizi. We define a set of rules enable us the passage from Arabizi to Arabic. Through these rules, we generate a set of candidates for the transliteration of each Arabizi word into arabic. Then, we extract the best candidate. This approach was evaluated by using three test corpora, and the obtained results show an improvement of the precision score which is equal to 75.11% for the best result. These results allow us to verify that …
Extracting Knowledge from an Arabic-English Machine-Readable Dictionary Using Information Extraction
Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；Department of EECE（电子工程与计算机科学系）；Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University（开罗大学计算机与信息学院）；Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University（开罗大学工程学院）；Department of Arabic Language and Literatures（阿拉伯语言与文学系）；Faculty of Arts, Cairo University（开罗大学艺术学院）
