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Effective multi-dialectal arabic POS tagging

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2020

Kareem Darwish ,
Mohammed Attia ,
Hamdy Mubarak ,
Younes Samih ,
Ahmed Abdelali Open the ORCID record for Ahmed Abdelali [Opens in a new window] ,
Lluís Màrquez ,
Mohamed Eldesouki  and
Laura Kallmeyer
Kareem Darwish
Affiliation:
Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar
Mohammed Attia
Affiliation:
Google Inc New York, New York, NY, USA
Hamdy Mubarak
Affiliation:
Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar
Younes Samih
Affiliation:
Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar
Ahmed Abdelali*
Affiliation:
Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar
Lluís Màrquez
Affiliation:
Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar
Mohamed Eldesouki
Affiliation:
Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar
Laura Kallmeyer
Affiliation:
Computational Linguistics Department, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, 40204 Düsseldorf, Germany
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: aabdelali@hbku.edu.qa
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Abstract

This work introduces robust multi-dialectal part of speech tagging trained on an annotated data set of Arabic tweets in four major dialect groups: Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, and Maghrebi. We implement two different sequence tagging approaches. The first uses conditional random fields (CRFs), while the second combines word- and character-based representations in a deep neural network with stacked layers of convolutional and recurrent networks with a CRF output layer. We successfully exploit a variety of features that help generalize our models, such as Brown clusters and stem templates. Also, we develop robust joint models that tag multi-dialectal tweets and outperform uni-dialectal taggers. We achieve a combined accuracy of 92.4% across all dialects, with per dialect results ranging between 90.2% and 95.4%. We obtained the results using a train/dev/test split of 70/10/20 for a data set of 350 tweets per dialect.

Keywords

Part-of-speech taggingArabicDialectsDeep neural networkBrown clusters

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