QADI: Arabic Dialect Identification in the Wild

Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak, Younes Samih, Sabit Hassan, Kareem Darwish

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

30 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Proper dialect identification is important for a variety of Arabic NLP applications. In this paper, we present a method for rapidly constructing a tweet dataset containing a wide range of country-level Arabic dialects-covering 18 different countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. Our method relies on applying multiple filters to identify users who belong to different countries based on their account descriptions and to eliminate tweets that either write mainly in Modern Standard Arabic or mostly use vulgar language. The resultant dataset contains 540k tweets from 2,525 users who are evenly distributed across 18 Arab countries. Using intrinsic evaluation, we show that the labels of a set of randomly selected tweets are 91.5% accurate. For extrinsic evaluation, we are able to build effective countrylevel dialect identification on tweets with a macro-averaged F1-score of 60.6% across 18 classes.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWANLP 2021 - 6th Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, Proceedings of the Workshop
EditorsNizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Hazem Hajj, Walid Magdy, Wajdi Zaghouani, Fethi Bougares, Nadi Tomeh, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Samia Touileb
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1-10
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085091
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event6th Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, WANLP 2021 - Virtual, Kyiv, Ukraine
Duration: 19 Apr 2021 → …

Publication series

NameWANLP 2021 - 6th Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, Proceedings of the Workshop

Conference

Conference6th Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, WANLP 2021
Country/TerritoryUkraine
CityVirtual, Kyiv
Period19/04/21 → …

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'QADI: Arabic Dialect Identification in the Wild'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this