Hamid Jaafar


2021

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A description and demonstration of SAFAR framework
Karim Bouzoubaa | Younes Jaafar | Driss Namly | Ridouane Tachicart | Rachida Tajmout | Hakima Khamar | Hamid Jaafar | Lhoussain Aouragh | Abdellah Yousfi
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

Several tools and resources have been developed to deal with Arabic NLP. However, a homogenous and flexible Arabic environment that gathers these components is rarely available. In this perspective, we introduce SAFAR which is a monolingual framework developed in accordance with software engineering requirements and dedicated to Arabic language, especially, the modern standard Arabic and Moroccan dialect. After one decade of integration and development, SAFAR possesses today more than 50 tools and resources that can be exploited either using its API or using its web interface.

2020

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MANorm: A Normalization Dictionary for Moroccan Arabic Dialect Written in Latin Script
Randa Zarnoufi | Hamid Jaafar | Walid Bachri | Mounia Abik
Proceedings of the Fifth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

Social media user generated text is actually the main resource for many NLP tasks. This text, however, does not follow the standard rules of writing. Moreover, the use of dialect such as Moroccan Arabic in written communications increases further NLP tasks complexity. A dialect is a verbal language that does not have a standard orthography. The written dialect is based on the phonetic transliteration of spoken words which leads users to improvise spelling while writing. Thus, for the same word we can find multiple forms of transliterations. Subsequently, it is mandatory to normalize these different transliterations to one canonical word form. To reach this goal, we have exploited the powerfulness of word embedding models generated with a corpus of YouTube comments. Besides, using a Moroccan Arabic dialect dictionary that provides the canonical forms, we have built a normalization dictionary that we refer to as MANorm. We have conducted several experiments to demonstrate the efficiency of MANorm, which have shown its usefulness in dialect normalization. We made MANorm freely available online.