TArC: Incrementally and Semi-Automatically Collecting a Tunisian Arabish Corpus

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 6279–6286 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 6279 TArC: Incrementally and Semi-Automatically Collecting a Tunisian Arabish Corpus Elisa Gugliotta1,2, Marco Dinarelli1 1. LIG, Bâtiment IMAG - 700 avenue Centrale - Domaine Universitaire de Saint-Martin-d’Hères, France 2. University of Rome Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy elisa.gugliotta@uniroma1.it, marco.dinarelli@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr Abstract This article describes the constitution process of the first morpho-syntactically annotated Tunisian Arabish Corpus (TArC). Arabish, also known as Arabizi, is a spontaneous coding of Arabic dialects in Latin characters and arithmographs (numbers used as letters). This code-system was developed by Arabic-speaking users of social media in order to facilitate the writing in the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and text messaging informal frameworks. There is variety in the realization of Arabish amongst dialects, and each Arabish code-system is under-resourced, in the same way as most of the Arabic dialects. In the last few years, the focus on Arabic dialects in the NLP field has considerably increased. Taking this into consideration, TArC will be a useful support for different types of analyses, computational and linguistic, as well as for NLP tools training. In this article we will describe preliminary work on the TArC semi-automatic construction process and some of the first analyses we developed on TArC. In addition, in order to provide a complete overview of the challenges faced during the building process, we will present the main Tunisian dialect characteristics and their encoding in Tunisian Arabish. Keywords: Tunisian Arabish Corpus, Arabic Dialect, Arabizi 1 Introduction Arabish is the romanization of Arabic Dialects (ADs) used for informal messaging, especially in social net- works.1 This writing system provides an interesting ground for linguistic research, computational as well as sociolinguistic, mainly due to the fact that it is a spontaneous representation of the ADs, and because it is a linguistic phenomenon in constant expansion on the web. Despite such potential, little research has been dedicated to Tunisian Arabish (TA). In this paper we describe the work we carried to develop a flexible and multi-purpose TA resource. This will include a TA corpus, together with some tools that could be useful for analyzing the corpus and for its extension with new data. First of all, the resource will be useful to give an overview of the TA. At the same time, it will be a reliable representation of the Tunisian dialect (TUN) evolution over the last ten years: the collected texts date from 2009 to present. This selection was done with the purpose to observe to what extent the TA or- thographic system has evolved toward a writing con- vention. Therefore, the TArC will be suitable for phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic studies, both in the linguistic and the Natural Lan- guage Processing (NLP) domains. For these reasons, we decided to build a corpus which could highlight the structural characteristics of TA through different anno- tation levels, including Part of Speech (POS) tags and 1Also …

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