Simple But Not Naïve: Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Identification Using Only N-Grams

Sohaila Eltanbouly, May Bashendy, Tamer Elsayed


Abstract
This paper presents the participation of Qatar University team in MADAR shared task, which addresses the problem of sentence-level fine-grained Arabic Dialect Identification over 25 different Arabic dialects in addition to the Modern Standard Arabic. Arabic Dialect Identification is not a trivial task since different dialects share some features, e.g., utilizing the same character set and some vocabularies. We opted to adopt a very simple approach in terms of extracted features and classification models; we only utilize word and character n-grams as features, and Na ̈ıve Bayes models as classifiers. Surprisingly, the simple approach achieved non-na ̈ıve performance. The official results, reported on a held-out testing set, show that the dialect of a given sentence can be identified at an accuracy of 64.58% by our best submitted run.
Anthology ID:
W19-4624
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Wassim El-Hajj, Lamia Hadrich Belguith, Fethi Bougares, Walid Magdy, Imed Zitouni, Nadi Tomeh, Mahmoud El-Haj, Wajdi Zaghouani
Venue:
WANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
214–218
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4624
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4624
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sohaila Eltanbouly, May Bashendy, and Tamer Elsayed. 2019. Simple But Not Naïve: Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Identification Using Only N-Grams. In Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 214–218, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Simple But Not Naïve: Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Identification Using Only N-Grams (Eltanbouly et al., WANLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4624.pdf