An Algerian Arabic-French Code-Switched Corpus
Abstract
Arabic is not just one language, but rather a collection of dialects in addition to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). While MSA is used in formal situations, dialects are the language of every day life. Until recently, there was very little dialectal Arabic in written form. With the advent of social-media, however, the landscape has changed. We provide the first romanized code-switched Algerian Arabic-French corpus annotated for word-level language id. We review the history and sociological factors that make the linguistic situation in Algerian unique and highlight the value of this corpus to the natural language processing and linguistics communities. To build this corpus, we crawled an Algerian newspaper and extracted the comments from the news story. We discuss the informal nature of the language in the corpus and the challenges it will present. Additionally, we provide a preliminary analysis of the corpus. We then discuss some potential uses of our corpus of interest to the computational linguistics community.
