QADI: Arabic Dialect Identification in the Wild

Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak, Younes Samih, Sabit Hassan, Kareem Darwish


Abstract
Proper dialect identification is important for a variety of Arabic NLP applications. In this paper, we present a method for rapidly constructing a tweet dataset containing a wide range of country-level Arabic dialects —covering 18 different countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. Our method relies on applying multiple filters to identify users who belong to different countries based on their account descriptions and to eliminate tweets that either write mainly in Modern Standard Arabic or mostly use vulgar language. The resultant dataset contains 540k tweets from 2,525 users who are evenly distributed across 18 Arab countries. Using intrinsic evaluation, we show that the labels of a set of randomly selected tweets are 91.5% accurate. For extrinsic evaluation, we are able to build effective country level dialect identification on tweets with a macro-averaged F1-score of 60.6% across 18 classes.
Anthology ID:
2021.wanlp-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Kyiv, Ukraine (Virtual)
Venue:
WANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–10
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wanlp-1.1
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak, Younes Samih, Sabit Hassan, and Kareem Darwish. 2021. QADI: Arabic Dialect Identification in the Wild. In Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 1–10, Kyiv, Ukraine (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
QADI: Arabic Dialect Identification in the Wild (Abdelali et al., WANLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.wanlp-1.1.pdf