Unified Guidelines and Resources for Arabic Dialect Orthography

Nizar Habash, Fadhl Eryani, Salam Khalifa, Owen Rambow, Dana Abdulrahim, Alexander Erdmann, Reem Faraj, Wajdi Zaghouani, Houda Bouamor, Nasser Zalmout, Sara Hassan, Faisal Al-Shargi, Sakhar B. Alkhereyfy, Basma Abdulkareem, Ramy Eskander, Mohammad Salameh, Hind Saddiki

Abstract: We present a unified set of guidelines and resources for conventional orthography of dialectal Arabic. While Standard Arabic has well defined orthographic standards, none of the Arabic dialects do today. Previous efforts on conventionalizing the dialectal orthography have focused on specific dialects and made often ad hoc decisions. In this work, we present a common set of guidelines and meta-guidelines and apply them to 28 Arab city dialects from Rabat to Muscat. These guidelines and their connected resources are being used by three large Arabic dialect processing projects in three universities.