Morphologically Annotated Corpora for Seven Arabic Dialects: Taizi, Sanaani, Najdi, Jordanian, Syrian, Iraqi and Moroccan

What it is about

The paper releases seven small manually annotated corpora of Arabic dialects (Taizi and Sanaani Yemeni, Najdi, Jordanian, Syrian Damascene, Iraqi Baghdadi, Moroccan Rabati), together over 200,000 words, each about 20,000 to 35,000 words. All seven use one annotation method: the DIWAN tool, one shared set of guidelines, a conventional orthography (CODA) that maps spontaneous spelling to a common form, diacritized lemmas, morphemes with POS, functional number and gender, and English glosses. Annotation runs in rounds: annotators, dialect leads who check each annotation, then a second round of scripts that look for impossible annotations (not wrong-in-context ones), then a format check. Table 3 lists the typical errors: missing null morphemes (for example a second-person subject with no overt suffix), the ta-marbuta letter, and case that should not be annotated at all for dialects.

Ideas

• I1. A checker for impossible annotations, not for wrong ones: a script that flags a stem with a morpheme it cannot take, a missing null morpheme, or a case tag on a form that has lost case. The paper uses it as the second round of error checking. The same kind of check can run on the analyses that tools/hbo and tools/macula produce from MACULA.
• I2. Spelling by etymology, not by sound: a word keeps the spelling of its cognate in the older variety, while the dialect's own morphemes are spelled as the dialect has them. For the Aramaic varieties, languages/tmr and languages/jpa can use the same rule: keep the Targumic or Biblical spelling for stems and write the later morphemes as they are, and state the rule once in the orthography chapter.
• I3. Turn the error table into regression tests: null-morpheme cases, ta-marbuta cases, and "no case tag" cases, each a single line with the expected analysis, run on every release of the Aramaic and Hebrew analyzers.

For Mova

I1 goes into tools/hbo (a post-analysis checker) and tools/macula (checks on the converted trees). I2 goes into languages/tmr/ and languages/jpa/ (orthography notes) and into the script chapters Script and phonology. I3 is a test set for tools/hbo and for the Aramaic varieties once they have a parser; the paper itself is a method reference, not a source of Hebrew data.

Topics: Treebanks

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/w19-4615

@inproceedings{alshargi2019morphologically,
  title = {{Morphologically Annotated Corpora for Seven Arabic Dialects: Taizi, Sanaani, Najdi, Jordanian, Syrian, Iraqi and Moroccan}},
  author = {Alshargi, Faisal and Dibas, Shahd and Alkhereyf, Sakhar and Faraj, Reem and Abdulkareem, Basmah and Yagi, Sane and Kacha, Ouafaa and Habash, Nizar and Rambow, Owen},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w19-4615},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-4615}
}

References

29 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Mark Cowell. 1964. A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic. Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. find
2. Abd Al-Salam Al-Amri, editor. 2000. Texts in Sanani Arabic. O. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, Germany. find
3. Salima Harrat, Karima Meftouh, Mourad Abbas, and Kamel Smaili. 2014. Building resources for Algerian Arabic dialects. In 15th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association Interspeech. find
4. Mona Diab, Mohamed Al-Badrashiny, Maryam Aminian, Mohammed Attia, Heba Elfardy, Nizar Habash, Abdelati Hawwari, Wael Salloum, Pradeep Dasigi, and Ramy Eskander. 2014. Tharwa: A Large Scale Dialectal Arabic-Standard Arabic-English Lexicon. In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), pages 3782–3789, Reykjavik, Iceland. find
5. Richard Harrell. 1962. A Short Reference Grammar of Moroccan Arabic: With Audio CD. Georgetown classics in Arabic language and linguistics. Georgetown University Press. find
6. Wallace Erwin. 1963. A Short Reference Grammar of Iraqi Arabic. Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. find
7. Clive Holes. 1990. Gulf Arabic. Croom Helm Descriptive Grammars. Routledge, London / New York. find
8. Ramy Eskander, Nizar Habash, and Owen Rambow. 2013. Automatic extraction of morphological lexicons from morphologically annotated corpora. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1032–1043, Seattle, Washington, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics. find
9. Clive Holes. 2004. Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties. Georgetown Classics in Arabic Language and Linguistics. Georgetown University Press. find
10. Bruce Ingham. 1994. Najdi Arabic. John Benjamins. find
11. Mustafa Jarrar, Nizar Habash, Diyam Akra, and Nasser Zalmout. 2014. Building a corpus for Palestinian Arabic: a preliminary study. In Proceedings of the EMNLP 2014 Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP), pages 18–27, Doha, Qatar. Association for Computational Linguistics. find
12. Ramy Eskander, Nizar Habash, Owen Rambow, and Arfath Pasha. 2016. Creating resources for dialectal Arabic from a single annotation: A case study on Egyptian and Levantine. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 3455– 3465, Osaka, Japan. find
13. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee. find
14. Salam Khalifa, Nizar Habash, Dana Abdulrahim, and Sara Hassan. 2016. A large scale corpus of Gulf Arabic. CoRR, abs/1609.02960. ↗
15. Nizar Habash, Mona T. Diab, and Owen Rambow. 2012a. Conventional orthography for dialectal Arabic. In LREC. find
16. Salam Khalifa, Nizar Habash, Fadhl Eryani, Ossama Obeid, Dana Abdulrahim, and Meera Al Kaabi. 2018. A morphologically annotated corpus of Emirati Arabic. In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Miyazaki, Japan. find
17. Nizar Habash, Fadhl Eryani, Salam Khalifa, Owen Rambow, Dana Abdulrahim, Alexander Erdmann, Reem Faraj, Wajdi Zaghouani, Houda Bouamor, Nasser Zalmout, Sara Hassan, Faisal Al shargi, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Basma Abdulkareem, Ramy Eskander, Mohammad Salameh, and Hind Saddiki. 2018. Unified guidelines and resources for Arabic dialect orthography. In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Miyazaki, Japan. find
18. Hanaa Kilany, Hassan Gadalla, Howaida Arram, Ashraf Yacoub, Alaa El-Habashi, and Cynthia McLemore. 2002. Egyptian Colloquial Arabic Lexicon. LDC catalog number LDC99L22. find
19. Nizar Habash, Ramy Eskander, and Abdelati Hawwari. 2012b. A morphological analyzer for Egyptian Arabic. In Proceedings of the twelfth meeting of the special interest group on computational morphology and phonology, pages 1–9. Association for Computational Linguistics. find our card
20. Mohamed Maamouri, Ann Bies, Tim Buckwalter, Mona Diab, Nizar Habash, Owen Rambow, and Dalila Tabessi. 2006. Developing and using a pilot dialectal Arabic treebank. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), Genoa, Italy. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). find
21. Nizar Habash, Ryan Roth, Owen Rambow, Ramy Eskander, and Nadi Tomeh. 2013. Morphological analysis and disambiguation for dialectal Arabic. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 426–432. find
22. Mohamed Maamouri, Ann Bies, Seth Kulick, Michael Ciul, Nizar Habash, and Ramy Eskander. 2014. Developing an Egyptian Arabic treebank: Impact of dialectal morphology on annotation and tool development. In LREC, pages 2348–2354. find
23. Arfath Pasha, Mohamed Al-Badrashiny, Mona T Diab, Ahmed El Kholy, Ramy Eskander, Nizar Habash, Manoj Pooleery, Owen Rambow, and Ryan Roth. 2014. Madamira: A fast, comprehensive tool for morphological analysis and disambiguation of Arabic. In LREC, volume 14, pages 1094–1101. find our card
24. Nizar Habash, Abdelhadi Soudi, and Tim Buckwalter. 2007. On Arabic Transliteration. In A. van den Bosch and A. Soudi, editors, Arabic Computational Morphology: Knowledge-based and Empirical Methods, pages 15–22. Springer, Netherlands. find
25. Wael Salloum and Nizar Habash. 2014. Adam: Analyzer for dialectal Arabic morphology. Journal of King Saud University-Computer and Information Sciences, 26(4):372–378. find
26. Clare Voss, Stephen Tratz, Jamal Laoudi, and Douglas Briesch. 2014. Finding romanized Arabic dialect in code-mixed tweets. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’14), pages 2249– 2253, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). ACL Anthology Identifier: L14-1086. ↗
27. Janet Watson, editor. 1993. A syntax of Sanani Arabic. O.Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, Germany. find
28. Janet Watson. 2002. The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic. Oxford University Press. find
29. Inès Zribi, Rahma Boujelbane, Abir Masmoudi, Mariem Ellouze, Lamia Hadrich Belguith, and Nizar Habash. 2014. A conventional orthography for Tunisian Arabic. In LREC, pages 2355–2361. find

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2019-alshargi-morphologically-annotated-corpora-seven-arabic/