A multidialectal parallel corpus of Arabic

Houda Bouamor, Nizar Habash, Kemal Oflazer

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The daily spoken variety of Arabic is often termed the colloquial or dialect form of Arabic. There are many Arabic dialects across the Arab World and within other Arabic speaking communities. These dialects vary widely from region to region and to a lesser extent from city to city in each region. The dialects are not standardized, they are not taught, and they do not have official status. However they are the primary vehicles of communication (face-to-face and recently, online) and have a large presence in the arts as well. In this paper, we present the first multidialectal Arabic parallel corpus, a collection of 2, 000 sentences in Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Tunisian, Jordanian, Palestinian and Syrian Arabic, in addition to English. Such parallel data does not exist naturally, which makes this corpus a very valuable resource that has many potential applications such as Arabic dialect identification and machine translation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Sara Goggi, Thierry Declerck, Joseph Mariani, Bente Maegaard, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Helene Mazo, Stelios Piperidis, Hrafn Loftsson
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages1240-1245
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9782951740884
StatePublished - 2014
Event9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014 - Reykjavik, Iceland
Duration: May 26 2014May 31 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014

Other

Other9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014
Country/TerritoryIceland
CityReykjavik
Period5/26/145/31/14

Keywords

  • Arabic
  • Dialects
  • Parallel Corpus

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Linguistics and Language
  • Library and Information Sciences
  • Education
  • Language and Linguistics

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