Conventional orthography for dialectal Arabic

Nizar Habash, Mona Diab, Owen Rambow

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

Abstract

Dialectal Arabic (DA) refers to the day-to-day vernaculars spoken in the Arab world. DA lives side-by-side with the official language, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). DA differs from MSA on all levels of linguistic representation, from phonology and morphology to lexicon and syntax. Unlike MSA, DA has no standard orthography since there are no Arabic dialect academies, nor is there a large edited body of dialectal literature that follows the same spelling standard. In this paper, we present CODA, a conventional orthography for dialectal Arabic; it is designed primarily for the purpose of developing computational models of Arabic dialects. We explain the design principles of CODA and provide a detailed description of its guidelines as applied to Egyptian Arabic.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2012
EditorsMehmet Ugur Dogan, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Sara Goggi, Khalid Choukri, Nicoletta Calzolari, Jan Odijk, Thierry Declerck, Bente Maegaard, Stelios Piperidis, Helene Mazo, Olivier Hamon
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages711-718
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9782951740877
StatePublished - 2012
Event8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2012 - Istanbul, Turkey
Duration: May 21 2012May 27 2012

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2012

Other

Other8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2012
Country/TerritoryTurkey
CityIstanbul
Period5/21/125/27/12

Keywords

  • Arabic
  • Dialects
  • Orthography

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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

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