LREC 2006 - Proceedings sorted by papers

Title	Developing and Using a Pilot Dialectal Arabic Treebank
Authors	M. Maamouri, A. Bies, T. Buckwalter, M. Diab, N. Habash, O. Rambow, D. Tabessi
Abstract	In this paper, we describe the methodological procedures and issues that emerged from the development of a pilot Levantine Arabic Treebank (LATB) at the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and its use at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Center for Language and Speech Processing workshop on Parsing Arabic Dialects (PAD). This pilot, consisting of morphological and syntactic annotation of approximately 26,000 words of Levantine Arabic conversational telephone speech, was developed under severe time constraints; hence the LDC team drew on their experience in treebanking Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) text. The resulting Levantine dialect treebanked corpus was used by the PAD team to develop and evaluate parsers for Levantine dialect texts. The parsers were trained on MSA resources and adapted using dialect-MSA lexical resources (some developed especially for this task) and existing linguistic knowledge about syntactic differences between MSA and dialect. The use of the LATB for development and evaluation of syntactic parsers allowed the PAD team to provide feedbasck to the LDC treebank developers. In this paper, we describe the creation of resources for this corpus, as well as transformations on the corpus to eliminate speech effects and lessen the gap between our pre-existing MSA resources and the new dialectal corpus
Keywords	Arabic, dialectal Arabic, Levantine, dialectal Treebank, morphological annotation, syntactic annotation, dialectal Arabic parsing, dictionary creation
Full paper	Developing and Using a Pilot Dialectal Arabic Treebank

Title

Developing and Using a Pilot Dialectal Arabic Treebank

Authors

M. Maamouri, A. Bies, T. Buckwalter, M. Diab, N. Habash, O. Rambow, D. Tabessi

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the methodological procedures and issues that emerged from the development of a pilot Levantine Arabic Treebank (LATB) at the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and its use at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Center for Language and Speech Processing workshop on Parsing Arabic Dialects (PAD). This pilot, consisting of morphological and syntactic annotation of approximately 26,000 words of Levantine Arabic conversational telephone speech, was developed under severe time constraints; hence the LDC team drew on their experience in treebanking Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) text. The resulting Levantine dialect treebanked corpus was used by the PAD team to develop and evaluate parsers for Levantine dialect texts. The parsers were trained on MSA resources and adapted using dialect-MSA lexical resources (some developed especially for this task) and existing linguistic knowledge about syntactic differences between MSA and dialect. The use of the LATB for development and evaluation of syntactic parsers allowed the PAD team to provide feedbasck to the LDC treebank developers. In this paper, we describe the creation of resources for this corpus, as well as transformations on the corpus to eliminate speech effects and lessen the gap between our pre-existing MSA resources and the new dialectal corpus

Keywords

Arabic, dialectal Arabic, Levantine, dialectal Treebank, morphological annotation, syntactic annotation, dialectal Arabic parsing, dictionary creation

Full paper

Developing and Using a Pilot Dialectal Arabic Treebank