Morphological Analysis and Disambiguation for Dialectal Arabic

Nizar Habash, Ryan Roth, Owen Rambow, Ramy Eskander and Nadi Tomeh

The many differences between Dialectal Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) pose a challenge to the majority of Arabic natural language processing tools, which are designed for MSA. In this paper, we retarget an existing state-of-the-art MSA morphological tagger to Egyptian Arabic (ARZ). Our evaluation demonstrates that our ARZ morphology tagger outperforms its MSA variant on ARZ input in terms of accuracy in part-of-speech tagging, diacritization, lemmatization and tokenization; and in terms of utility for ARZ-to-English statistical machine translation.