Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Identification

Mohammad Salameh, Houda Bouamor, Nizar Habash


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
C18-1113
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1332–1344
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1113
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohammad Salameh, Houda Bouamor, and Nizar Habash. 2018. Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Identification. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1332–1344, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Identification (Salameh et al., COLING 2018)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/C18-1113.pdf