The interplay between language similarity and script on a novel multi-layer Algerian dialect corpus

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021, pages 3700–3712 August 1–6, 2021. ©2021 Association for Computational Linguistics 3700 The interplay between language similarity and script on a novel multi-layer Algerian dialect corpus Samia Touileb Department of Informatics University of Oslo samiat@uio.no Jeremy Barnes Department of Informatics University of Oslo jeremycb@uio.no Abstract Recent years have seen a rise in interest for cross-lingual transfer between languages with similar typology, and between languages of various scripts. However, the interplay be- tween language similarity and difference in script on cross-lingual transfer is a less stud- ied problem. We explore this interplay on cross-lingual transfer for two supervised tasks, namely part-of-speech tagging and sentiment analysis. We introduce a newly annotated corpus of Algerian user-generated comments comprising parallel annotations of Algerian written in Latin, Arabic, and code-switched scripts, as well as annotations for sentiment and topic categories. We perform baseline experiments by fine-tuning multi-lingual lan- guage models. We further explore the effect of script vs. language similarity in cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning multi-lingual models on languages which are a) typologically dis- tinct, but use the same script, b) typologically similar, but use a distinct script, or c) are typo- logically similar and use the same script. We find there is a delicate relationship between script and typology for part-of-speech, while sentiment analysis is less sensitive. 1 Introduction Cross-lingual transfer has shown promising results for several tasks, however the effect of and the interplay between typologically related languages and languages that do not share the same script has seen less focus. This is especially true for under-resourced vernacular languages and dialects. In this paper, we focus our work on the Algerian language, a non-standardized vernacular Arabic variety, characterized by the heavy use of both code-switching and borrowings. The existing code- switching can be anything from local Algerian dialects (e.g. region based Algerian or Berber), French, English, Spanish, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), or other Arabic dialects. The borrowings depend on the speakers’ background, but is usually heavily French-based. Algerian is a spoken language with no standard- ized writing, and with the rise of social media, it has become a language extensively used to com- municate online. Algerian can be written in both Arabic and Latin scripts, and code-switching can therefore occur in a mixture of scripts, or within one same script. Arabic varieties written in Latin script are referred to as Arabizi, with north African languages referred to as North African Arabizi, NArabizi in short (Seddah et al., 2020). For the remainder of the paper, we will refer to Algerian written in Latin script as NArabizi (NA) and Al- gerian written in Arabic script as Algerian Arabic (DZ). The broad usage of Algerian results in large amounts of data, with no resources or tools to auto- matically process them. To address this issue and further investigate which of scripts and typological differences influence the results the most, we use a corpus of user comments that reflect the nature of the Algerian vernacular dialect: with heavy use …

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