A Multi-Dialect, Multi-Genre Corpus of Informal Written Arabic

This paper presents a multi-dialect, multi-genre, human annotated corpus of dialectal Arabic with data obtained from both online newspaper commentary and Twitter. Most Arabic corpora are small and focus on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). There has been recent interest, however, in the construction of dialectal Arabic corpora (Zaidan and Callison-Burch, 2011a; Al-Sabbagh and Girju, 2012). This work differs from previously constructed corpora in two ways. First, we include coverage of five dialects of Arabic: Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine, Maghrebi and Iraqi. This is the most complete coverage of any dialectal corpus known to the authors. In addition to data, we provide results for the Arabic dialect identification task that outperform those reported in Zaidan and Callison-Burch (2011a).