We present QADI, an automatically collected dataset of tweets belonging to a wide range of country-level Arabic dialects -covering 18 different countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. Our method for building this dataset relies on applying multiple filters to identify users who belong to different countries based on their account descriptions and to eliminate tweets that are either written in Modern Standard Arabic or contain inappropriate language. The resultant dataset contains 540k tweets from 2,525 users who are evenly distributed across 18 Arab countries. Using intrinsic evaluation, we show that the labels of a set of randomly selected tweets are 91.5% accurate. For extrinsic evaluation, we are able to build effective country-level dialect identification on tweets with a macro-averaged F1-score of 60.6% across 18 classes.
Exploiting Dialect Identification in Automatic Dialectal Text Normalization
Computational Approaches to Modeling Language Lab（语言建模计算方法实验室）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学迪拜分校）；Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学多哈分校）
This paper presents our approach to address the EACL WANLP-2021 Shared Task 1: Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI). The task is aimed at developing a system that identifies the geographical location(country/province) from where an Arabic tweet in the form of modern standard Arabic or dialect comes from. We solve the task in two parts. The first part involves pre-processing the provided dataset by cleaning, adding and segmenting various parts of the text. This is followed by carrying out experiments with different versions of two Transformer based models, AraBERT and AraELECTRA. Our fi…
In this paper, we tackle the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2021) and demonstrate state-of-the-art results on all of its four subtasks. Tasks are to identify the geographic origin of short Dialectal (DA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) utterances at the levels of both country and province. Our final model is an ensemble of variants built on top of MARBERT that achieves an F1-score of 34.03% for DA at the country-level development set -- an improvement of 7.63% from previous work.
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）
We describe findings of the third Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2022). NADI aims at advancing state of the art Arabic NLP, including on Arabic dialects. It does so by affording diverse datasets and modeling opportunities in a standardized context where meaningful comparisons between models and approaches are possible. NADI 2022 targeted both dialect identification (Subtask 1) and dialectal sentiment analysis (Subtask 2) at the country level. A total of 41 unique teams registered for the shared task, of whom 21 teams have actually participated (with 105 valid submissio…
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）
We present the findings and results of the Second Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2021). This Shared Task includes four subtasks: country-level Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) identification (Subtask 1.1), country-level dialect identification (Subtask 1.2), province-level MSA identification (Subtask 2.1), and province-level sub-dialect identification (Subtask 2.2). The shared task dataset covers a total of 100 provinces from 21 Arab countries, collected from the Twitter domain. A total of 53 teams from 23 countries registered to participate in the tasks, thus reflecting th…
NADI 2023: The Fourth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）
College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学人文与社会科学学院）；Carnegie Mellon University Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）
In this paper, we present the annotation pipeline and the guidelines we wrote as part of an effort to create a large manually annotated Arabic author profiling dataset from various social media sources covering 16 Arabic countries and 11 dialectal regions. The target size of the annotated ARAP-Tweet corpus is more than 2.4 million words. We illustrate and summarize our general and dialect-specific guidelines for each of the dialectal regions selected. We also present the annotation framework and logistics. We control the annotation quality frequently by computing the inter-annotator agreement …
College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学人文与社会科学学院）；Carnegie Mellon University Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）
In this paper, we present Arap-Tweet, which is a large-scale and multi-dialectal corpus of Tweets from 11 regions and 16 countries in the Arab world representing the major Arabic dialectal varieties. To build this corpus, we collected data from Twitter and we provided a team of experienced annotators with annotation guidelines that they used to annotate the corpus for age categories, gender, and dialectal variety. During the data collection effort, we based our search on distinctive keywords that are specific to the different Arabic dialects and we also validated the location using Twitter API…
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar（卡塔尔卡内基梅隆大学）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）
We present the results and findings of the First Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI). This Shared Task includes two subtasks: country-level dialect identification (Subtask 1) and province-level sub-dialect identification (Subtask 2). The data for the shared task covers a total of 100 provinces from 21 Arab countries and are collected from the Twitter domain. As such, NADI is the first shared task to target naturally-occurring fine-grained dialectal text at the sub-country level. A total of 61 teams from 25 countries registered to participate in the tasks, thus reflecting t…
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…
NADI 2024: The Fifth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar（卡塔尔卡内基梅隆大学）
ARCADE: A City-Scale Corpus for Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Tagging
Tuwaiq Academy（图瓦伊克学院）；Robotics and Internet-of-Things Laboratory（机器人与物联网实验室）；Prince Sultan University（普森大学）；Higher School of Communication of Tunis (SUP’COM)（突尼斯通信高级学校）
SalamahBench: Dialect and Category Level Safety Evaluation of Arabic Language Models
Compumacy for Artificial Intelligence Solutions（Compumacy人工智能解决方案公司）；Taibah University（泰巴大学）；George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）
AraFinNLP 2024: The First Arabic Financial NLP Shared Task
Birzeit University（比尔宰特大学）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；King Saud University（沙特国王大学）；Mohammed VI Polytechnic University（穆罕默德六世理工大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
We report our models for detecting age, language variety, and gender from social media data in the context of the Arabic author profiling and deception detection shared task (APDA). We build simple models based on pre-trained bidirectional encoders from transformers (BERT). We first fine-tune the pre-trained BERT model on each of the three datasets with shared task released data. Then we augment shared task data with in-house data for gender and dialect, showing the utility of augmenting training data. Our best models on the shared task test data are acquired with a majority voting of various …
Morphological tagging is challenging for morphologically rich languages due to the large target space and the need for more training data to minimize model sparsity. Dialectal variants of morphologically rich languages suffer more as they tend to be more noisy and have less resources. In this paper we explore the use of multitask learning and adversarial training to address morphological richness and dialectal variations in the context of full morphological tagging. We use multitask learning for joint morphological modeling for the features within two dialects, and as a knowledge-transfer sche…
LIG（信息学实验室）；University of Rome Sapienza（罗马大学（萨皮恩扎））
This article describes the constitution process of the first morpho-syntactically annotated Tunisian Arabish Corpus (TArC). Arabish, also known as Arabizi, is a spontaneous coding of Arabic dialects in Latin characters and arithmographs (numbers used as letters). This code-system was developed by Arabic-speaking users of social media in order to facilitate the writing in the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and text messaging informal frameworks. There is variety in the realization of Arabish amongst dialects, and each Arabish code-system is under-resourced, in the same way as most of the…
Northwest University（西北大学）；University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）
Arabic sentiment analysis has become an important research field in recent years. Initially, work focused on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is the most widely-used form. Since then, work has been carried out on several different dialects, including Egyptian, Levantine and Moroccan. Moreover, a number of datasets have been created to support such work. However, up until now, less work has been carried out on Sudanese Arabic, a dialect which has 32 million speakers. In this paper, two new publicly available datasets are introduced, the 2-Class Sudanese Sentiment Dataset (SudSenti2) and the …
Over the recent decades, there has been a significant increase and development of resources for Arabic natural language processing. This includes the task of exploring Arabic Language Sentiment Analysis (ALSA) from Arabic utterances in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and different Arabic dialects. This study focuses on detecting sentiment in poems written in Misurata Arabic sub-dialect spoken in Misurata, Libya. The tools used to detect sentiment from the dataset are Sklearn as well as Mazajak sentiment tool 1. Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Naive Bayes (NB), and Support Vector Machines…
ICOSI Laboratory, University of Khenchela（肯谢拉大学ICOSI实验室）；LIRE Laboratory, University of Constantine 2（君士坦丁第二大学LIRE实验室）；TechNE Laboratory, University of Poitiers（普瓦捷大学TechNE实验室）
In this paper, we propose our enhanced approach to create a dedicated corpus for Algerian Arabic newspapers comments. The developed approach has to enhance an existing approach by the enrichment of the available corpus and the inclusion of the annotation step by following the Model Annotate Train Test Evaluate Revise (MATTER) approach. A corpus is created by collecting comments from web sites of three well know Algerian newspapers. Three classifiers, support vector machines, na{ï}ve Bayes, and k-nearest neighbors, were used for classification of comments into positive and negative classes. To …
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…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
We present Camelira, a web-based Arabic multi-dialect morphological disambiguation tool that covers four major variants of Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Gulf, and Levantine. Camelira offers a user-friendly web interface that allows researchers and language learners to explore various linguistic information, such as part-of-speech, morphological features, and lemmas. Our system also provides an option to automatically choose an appropriate dialect-specific disambiguator based on the prediction of a dialect identification component. Camelira is publicly accessible at http://camelira.…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；Kanari AI（卡纳里人工智能公司）
We introduce the largest transcribed Arabic speech corpus, QASR, collected from the broadcast domain. This multi-dialect speech dataset contains 2,000 hours of speech sampled at 16kHz crawled from Aljazeera news channel. The dataset is released with lightly supervised transcriptions, aligned with the audio segments. Unlike previous datasets, QASR contains linguistically motivated segmentation, punctuation, speaker information among others. QASR is suitable for training and evaluating speech recognition systems, acoustics- and/or linguistics- based Arabic dialect identification, punctuation res…
Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University（萨塔姆·本·阿卜杜勒阿齐兹王子大学）
The automatic classification of Arabic dialects is an ongoing research challenge, which has been explored in recent work that defines dialects based on increasingly limited geographic areas like cities and provinces. This paper focuses on a related yet relatively unexplored topic: the effects of the geographical proximity of cities located in Arab countries on their dialectical similarity. Our work is twofold, reliant on: 1) comparing the textual similarities between dialects using cosine similarity and 2) measuring the geographical distance between locations. We study MADAR and NADI, two esta…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；JHU Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP)（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学语言与语音处理中心）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
We investigate different approaches for dialect identification in Arabic broadcast speech, using phonetic, lexical features obtained from a speech recognition system, and acoustic features using the i-vector framework. We studied both generative and discriminate classifiers, and we combined these features using a multi-class Support Vector Machine (SVM). We validated our results on an Arabic/English language identification task, with an accuracy of 100%. We used these features in a binary classifier to discriminate between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic, with an accuracy of …
Ara-HOPE: Human-Centric Post-Editing Evaluation for Dialectal Arabic to Modern Standard Arabic Translation
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院）；Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum & LIACS, Universiteit Leiden（莱顿大学莱顿医学校区及LIACS）；School of Computer Science, University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学计算机科学学院）
Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University（里昂第三大学）；Linguistics Research Center - Corpus, Discourse and Societies（语言学研究中心 - 语料库、话语与社会）；ILCEA4-CREO (Grenoble Alpes University)（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学ILCEA4-CREO）
Based on an annotated multimedia corpus, television series Mar{ā}y{ā} 2013, we dig into the question of ''automatic standardization'' of Arabic dialects for machine translation. Here we distinguish between rule-based machine translation and statistical machine translation. Machine translation from Arabic most of the time takes standard or modern Arabic as the source language and produces quite satisfactory translations thanks to the availability of the translation memories necessary for training the models. The case is different for the translation of Arabic dialects. The productions are much …
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）；University of Düsseldorf（杜塞尔多夫大学）
Diacritization process attempt to restore the short vowels in Arabic written text; which typically are omitted. This process is essential for applications such as Text-to-Speech (TTS). While diacritization of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) still holds the lion share, research on dialectal Arabic (DA) diacritization is very limited. In this paper, we present our contribution and results on the automatic diacritization of two sub-dialects of Maghrebi Arabic, namely Tunisian and Moroccan, using a character-level deep neural network architecture that stacks two bi-LSTM layers over a CRF output layer…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Carnegie Mellon University Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）
We present the second ever evaluated Arabic dialect-to-dialect machine translation effort, and the first to leverage external resources beyond a small parallel corpus. The subject has not previously received serious attention due to lack of naturally occurring parallel data; yet its importance is evidenced by dialectal Arabic's wide usage and breadth of inter-dialect variation, comparable to that of Romance languages. Our results suggest that modeling morphology and syntax significantly improves dialect-to-dialect translation, though optimizing such data-sparse models requires consideration of…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）
We present state-of-the-art results on morphosyntactic tagging across different varieties of Arabic using fine-tuned pre-trained transformer language models. Our models consistently outperform existing systems in Modern Standard Arabic and all the Arabic dialects we study, achieving 2.6% absolute improvement over the previous state-of-the-art in Modern Standard Arabic, 2.8% in Gulf, 1.6% in Egyptian, and 8.3% in Levantine. We explore different training setups for fine-tuning pre-trained transformer language models, including training data size, the use of external linguistic resources, and the…
Mohammed VI Polytechnic University（穆罕默德六世理工大学）；Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University（西迪·穆罕默德·本·阿卜杜拉大学）；University of Sherbrooke（舍布鲁克大学）
Dialect and standard language identification are crucial tasks for many Arabic natural language processing applications. In this paper, we present our deep learning-based system, submitted to the second NADI shared task for country-level and province-level identification of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA). The system is based on an end-to-end deep Multi-Task Learning (MTL) model to tackle both country-level and province-level MSA/DA identification. The latter MTL model consists of a shared Bidirectional Encoder Representation Transformers (BERT) encoder, two task-specifi…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；University of Düsseldorf（杜塞尔多夫大学）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
Arabic word segmentation is essential for a variety of NLP applications such as machine translation and information retrieval. Segmentation entails breaking words into their constituent stems, affixes and clitics. In this paper, we compare two approaches for segmenting four major Arabic dialects using only several thousand training examples for each dialect. The two approaches involve posing the problem as a ranking problem, where an SVM ranker picks the best segmentation, and as a sequence labeling problem, where a bi-LSTM RNN coupled with CRF determines where best to segment words. We are ab…
Can Dialects Be Steered Like Languages? Sparse Neurons and Distributed Directions in Arabic LLMs
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；Tohoku University（东北大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）
