Unified Guidelines and Resources for Arabic Dialect Orthography

Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

Abstract

We present a unified set of guidelines and resources for conventional orthography of dialectal Arabic. While Standard Arabic has well defined orthographic standards, none of the Arabic dialects do today. Previous efforts on conventionalizing the dialectal orthography have focused on specific dialects and made often ad hoc decisions. In this work, we present a common set of guidelines and meta-guidelines and apply them to 28 Arab city dialects from Rabat to Muscat. These guidelines and their connected resources are being used by three large Arabic dialect processing projects in three universities.