Learning from Relatives: Unified Dialectal Arabic Segmentation

Younes Samih, Mohamed Eldesouki, Mohammed Attia, Kareem Darwish, Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak, Laura Kallmeyer


Abstract
Arabic dialects do not just share a common koiné, but there are shared pan-dialectal linguistic phenomena that allow computational models for dialects to learn from each other. In this paper we build a unified segmentation model where the training data for different dialects are combined and a single model is trained. The model yields higher accuracies than dialect-specific models, eliminating the need for dialect identification before segmentation. We also measure the degree of relatedness between four major Arabic dialects by testing how a segmentation model trained on one dialect performs on the other dialects. We found that linguistic relatedness is contingent with geographical proximity. In our experiments we use SVM-based ranking and bi-LSTM-CRF sequence labeling.
Anthology ID:
K17-1043
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017)
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Roger Levy, Lucia Specia
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
432–441
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K17-1043
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K17-1043
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Younes Samih, Mohamed Eldesouki, Mohammed Attia, Kareem Darwish, Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak, and Laura Kallmeyer. 2017. Learning from Relatives: Unified Dialectal Arabic Segmentation. In Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017), pages 432–441, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning from Relatives: Unified Dialectal Arabic Segmentation (Samih et al., CoNLL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/K17-1043.pdf