Dialectal Arabic Segmenter

Dialectal Arabic Segmenter is a freeware module developed by the ALT team at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) to process Dialectal Arabic. The segmenter is built using a collection of tweets from frour regions - Egypt, Gulf, Maghrib and Levantine.

Arabic Dialects Segmenter implemented using Keras/BiLSTM/ChainCRF.

Requirements

This segmenter requires the following packages:

• Python version 2.7

  • Python 3.4 should be fine as well (some minor changes)

• tensorflow version 0.9 or later: https://www.tensorflow.org

• keras version 1.2.2 or later: http://keras.io

• nltk version 3.0 or later

Installation

You can install the Dialectal Arabic Segmenter by cloning the repo:

Installing Dialectal Arabic Segmenter from github

Clone the repo from the github using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/qcri/dialectal_segmenter.git

Or download the compressed file of the project, extract it.

Getting started

Dialectal Arabic Segmenter reads an input Arabic text file from the stdin and produces the segmentation line per line. The segmenter expects the input file encoded in UTF-8,

python code/dialects_segmenter.py -i [in-file] -o [out-file] 

For more details see:

python code/dialects_segmenter.py -h

Publications

Younes Samih, Mohamed Eldesouki, Mohammed Attia, Kareem Darwish, Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak, Laura Kallmeyer, (2017), Learning from Relatives: Unified Dialectal Arabic Segmentation, Journal Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017), Pages 432-441.

Mohamed Eldesouki, Younes Samih, Ahmed Abdelali, Mohammed Attia, Hamdy Mubarak, Kareem Darwish, Kallmeyer Laura, (2017), Arabic Multi-Dialect Segmentation: bi-LSTM-CRF vs. SVM, arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.05891.

Younes Samih, Mohammed Attia, Mohamed Eldesouki, Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak, Laura Kallmeyer, Kareem Darwish, (2017), A Neural Architecture for Dialectal Arabic Segmentation, Journal Proceedings of the Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, Pages 46-54.

Support

You can ask questions and join the development discussion:

• On the Dialectal Arabic Tools Google group.
• On the Dialectal Arabic Tools Slack channel. Use this link to request an invitation to the channel.

You can also post bug reports and feature requests (only) in Github issues. Make sure to read our guidelines first.

License

Dialectal Arabic Segmenter is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

---