This demo paper describes ADIDA, a web-based system for automatic dialect identification for Arabic text. The system distinguishes among the dialects of 25 Arab cities (from Rabat to Muscat) in addition to Modern Standard Arabic. The results are presented with either a point map or a heat map visualizing the automatic identification probabilities over a geographical map of the Arab World.

Previous work on the problem of Arabic Dialect Identification typically targeted coarse-grained five dialect classes plus Standard Arabic (6-way classification). This paper presents the first results on a fine-grained dialect classification task covering 25 specific cities from across the Arab World, in addition to Standard Arabic – a very challenging task. We build several classification systems and explore a large space of features. Our results show that we can identify the exact city of a speaker at an accuracy of 67.9% for sentences with an average length of 7 words (a 9% relative error reduction over the state-of-the-art technique for Arabic dialect identification) and reach more than 90% when we consider 16 words. We also report on additional insights from a data analysis of similarity and difference across Arabic dialects.

We present the SemEval-2018 Task 1: Affect in Tweets, which includes an array of subtasks on inferring the affectual state of a person from their tweet. For each task, we created labeled data from English, Arabic, and Spanish tweets. The individual tasks are: 1. emotion intensity regression, 2. emotion intensity ordinal classification, 3. valence (sentiment) regression, 4. valence ordinal classification, and 5. emotion classification. Seventy-five teams (about 200 team members) participated in the shared task. We summarize the methods, resources, and tools used by the participating teams, with a focus on the techniques and resources that are particularly useful. We also analyze systems for consistent bias towards a particular race or gender. The data is made freely available to further improve our understanding of how people convey emotions through language.

Existing Arabic sentiment lexicons have low coverage―with only a few thousand entries. In this paper, we present several large sentiment lexicons that were automatically generated using two different methods: (1) by using distant supervision techniques on Arabic tweets, and (2) by translating English sentiment lexicons into Arabic using a freely available statistical machine translation system. We compare the usefulness of new and old sentiment lexicons in the downstream application of sentence-level sentiment analysis. Our baseline sentiment analysis system uses numerous surface form features. Nonetheless, the system benefits from using additional features drawn from sentiment lexicons. The best result is obtained using the automatically generated Dialectal Hashtag Lexicon and the Arabic translations of the NRC Emotion Lexicon (accuracy of 66.6%). Finally, we describe a qualitative study of the automatic translations of English sentiment lexicons into Arabic, which shows that about 88% of the automatically translated entries are valid for English as well. Close to 10% of the invalid entries are caused by gross mistranslations, close to 40% by translations into a related word, and about 50% by differences in how the word is used in Arabic.