Summary of the paper

Title A Multi-Dialect, Multi-Genre Corpus of Informal Written Arabic
Authors Ryan Cotterell and Chris Callison-Burch
Abstract This paper presents a multi-dialect, multi-genre, human annotated corpus of dialectal Arabic. We collected utterances in five Arabic dialects: Levantine, Gulf, Egyptian, Iraqi and Maghrebi. We scraped newspaper websites for user commentary and Twitter for two distinct types of dialectal content. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the most diverse corpus of dialectal Arabic in both the source of the content and the number of dialects. Every utterance in the corpus was human annotated on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; this stands in contrast to Al-Sabbagh and Girju (2012) where only a small subset was human annotated in order to train a classifier to automatically annotate the remainder of the corpus. We provide a discussion of the methodology used for the annotation in addition to the performance of the individual workers. We extend the Arabic dialect identification task to the Iraqi and Maghrebi dialects and improve the results of Zaidan and Callison-Burch (2011a) on Levantine, Gulf and Egyptian.
Topics Language Identification, Crowdsourcing
Full paper A Multi-Dialect, Multi-Genre Corpus of Informal Written Arabic
Bibtex @InProceedings{COTTERELL14.641,
  author = {Ryan Cotterell and Chris Callison-Burch},
  title = {A Multi-Dialect, Multi-Genre Corpus of Informal Written Arabic},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)},
  year = {2014},
  month = {may},
  date = {26-31},
  address = {Reykjavik, Iceland},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Hrafn Loftsson and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {978-2-9517408-8-4},
  language = {english}
 }
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