Building a Corpus for Palestinian Arabic: a Preliminary Study

This paper presents preliminary results in building an annotated corpus of the Palestinian Arabic dialect. The corpus consists of about 43K words, stemming from diverse resources. The paper discusses some linguistic facts about the Palestinian dialect, compared with the Modern Standard Arabic, especially in terms of morphological, orthographic, and lexical variations, and suggests some directions to resolve the challenges these differences pose to the annotation goal. Furthermore, we present two pilot studies that investigate whether existing tools for processing Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic can be used to speed up the annotation process of our Palestinian Arabic corpus.