Guidelines for Annotation of Arabic Dialectness
Résumé
The Arabic language is a collection of variants with phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic differences comparable to those
among the Romance languages. However, throughout the Arab world, the standard written language is the same, Modern Standard
Arabic (MSA). MSA is based on Classical Arabic and is itself not a native spoken language. MSA is used in some official spoken
communication, such as newscasts, parliamentary debates, etc. Other forms of Arabic (generally referred to as "dialects" of MSA) are
what people use for daily spoken communication. In this paper, we focus on the issue of creating standard annotation guidelines
identifying dialect switching between MSA and at least one dialect in written text. These guidelines can form the basis for the annotation
of large collections of data that will be used for training and testing automatic approaches to dialect identification and automatic
processing of Arabic which exhibits dialect switching. We report on some initial annotation experiments: we discuss statistical
distributions of labels in a small corpus (~19K words) that we annotated according to the guidelines and present inter-annotator
agreement results.
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