Building a Corpus for Palestinian Arabic: a Preliminary Study

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary results in building an annotated corpus of the Palestinian Arabic dialect. The corpus consists of about 43K words, stemming from diverse resources. The paper discusses some linguistic facts about the Palestinian dialect, compared with the Modern Standard Arabic, especially in terms of morphological, orthographic, and lexical variations, and suggests some directions to resolve the challenges these differences pose to the annotation goal. Furthermore, we present two pilot studies that investigate whether existing tools for processing Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic can be used to speed up the annotation process of our Palestinian Arabic corpus.

A Morphological Analyzer for Gulf Arabic Verbs

“…CALIMA EGY performs much better than SAMA which is also consistent with previous results (Khalifa et al, 2016;Jarrar et al, 2014). CALIMA GLF outperforms both SAMA and CALIMA EGY on all measured conditions.…”

“…proposed a Conventional Orthography for Dialectal Arabic (CODA) as part of a solution allowing different researchers to agree on a set of DA orthographic conventions for computational purposes. CODA was first defined for EGY, but has been extended to Palestinian, Tunisian, Algerian, Maghrebi and Gulf Arabic (Jarrar et al, 2014;Zribi et al, 2014;Saadane and Habash, 2015;Turki et al, 2016;Khalifa et al, 2016). We follow the conventions defined by Khalifa et al (2016) for CODA GLF.…”

“…As for LEV, there exist morphologically annotated corpora and a treebank (Jarrar et al, 2014;Jarrar et al, 2016;Maamouri et al, 2006). Newly developed corpora for other dialects include Smaïli et al, 2014;Al-Shargi et al, 2016;Khalifa et al, 2016) for Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, Yemeni and Gulf Arabic respectively.…”

Proceedings of The 9th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

“…Habash et al (2012) proposed a Conventional Orthography for Dialectal Arabic (or CODA) targeting Egyptian Arabic for computational modeling purposes and demonstrated how to map to it in and (Pasha et al, 2014;. CODAs for other dialects have also been proposed (Zribi et al, 2014;Jarrar et al, 2014). In our current annotation task we neither address dialectal Arabic spelling normalization , nor do we systematically translate dialectal words into Standard Arabic (Salloum and Habash, 2013).…”

Arabic Transliteration of Romanized Tunisian Dialect Text: A Preliminary Investigation

“…Text in CODA can be read perfectly in DA given the specific dialect and its CODA map. CODA has been designed for the Egyptian Dialect [7] as well as the Tunisian Dialect [15] and the Palestinian Levantine Dialect [9]. For a full presentation of CODA and an explanation of its choices, see ( [7], [15]).…”