Developing an Egyptian Arabic Treebank: Impact of Dialectal Morphology on Annotation and Tool Development

Mohamed Maamouri, Ann Bies, Seth Kulick, Michael Ciul, Nizar Habash, Ramy Eskander


Abstract
This paper describes the parallel development of an Egyptian Arabic Treebank and a morphological analyzer for Egyptian Arabic (CALIMA). By the very nature of Egyptian Arabic, the data collected is informal, for example Discussion Forum text, which we use for the treebank discussed here. In addition, Egyptian Arabic, like other Arabic dialects, is sufficiently different from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) that tools and techniques developed for MSA cannot be simply transferred over to work on Egyptian Arabic work. In particular, a morphological analyzer for Egyptian Arabic is needed to mediate between the written text and the segmented, vocalized form used for the syntactic trees. This led to the necessity of a feedback loop between the treebank team and the analyzer team, as improvements in each area were fed to the other. Therefore, by necessity, there needed to be close cooperation between the annotation team and the tool development team, which was to their mutual benefit. Collaboration on this type of challenge, where tools and resources are limited, proved to be remarkably synergistic and opens the way to further fruitful work on Arabic dialects.
Anthology ID:
L14-1100
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2348–2354
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1145_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohamed Maamouri, Ann Bies, Seth Kulick, Michael Ciul, Nizar Habash, and Ramy Eskander. 2014. Developing an Egyptian Arabic Treebank: Impact of Dialectal Morphology on Annotation and Tool Development. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 2348–2354, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Developing an Egyptian Arabic Treebank: Impact of Dialectal Morphology on Annotation and Tool Development (Maamouri et al., LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1145_Paper.pdf