Towards Understanding Egyptian Arabic Dialogues

Labelling of user's utterances to understanding his attends which called Dialogue Act (DA) classification, it is considered the key player for dialogue language understanding layer in automatic dialogue systems. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to user's utterances labeling for Egyptian spontaneous dialogues and Instant Messages using Machine Learning (ML) approach without relying on any special lexicons, cues, or rules. Due to the lack of Egyptian dialect dialogue corpus, the system evaluated by multi-genre corpus includes 4725 utterances for three domains, which are collected and annotated manually from Egyptian call-centers. The system achieves F1 scores of 70. 36% overall domains.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1505.0308

Urban Mediterranean dialects of Arabic : Tangier and Tunis

textThis thesis compares two urban Mediterranean dialects of Arabic in North Africa: the Arabic dialect of Tangier, Morocco and the Arabic dialect of Tunis, Tunisia. Both of these dialects have traditionally been classified as "pre-Hilalian" varieties, which originated with the first wave of Arab Muslim invasions of North Africa in the late 7th century CE. Tangier and Tunis not only underwent similar historical developments; the Arabic dialects of these two cities also underwent similar developments, in addition to sharing the features used as criteria for the pre-Hilalian dialect grouping. This thesis shows the similarities between the language contact situations in Tangier and Tunis historically in order to explain the parallel development of the morphosyntactic features--specifically the paradigms for the 2nd person category in pronominals as well as perfective, imperfective, and imperative verb inflections--shared by the Arabic dialects of these two cities today.Middle Eastern Studie

Current Perspectives on Tunisian Sociolinguistics

Despite its small size (63,170 sq miles) and a rather small population with a stable growth rate,2 Tunisia represents a rich sociolinguistic laboratory with a long history of bilingualism and language contact. The delicate position of Berber, the diglossic situation of Arabic and the increasing efforts for Arabization, the regional and social variation in Tunisian Arabic, the presence of French, and the gradual spread of English, among other closely-related topics, constitute the core themes of research within Tunisian sociolinguistics. Since the publication of R. M. Payne’s Language in Tunisia in 1983, no attempt has been made to reassess the situation from all its angles, except for some overview articles now and then (Laroussi 1999; Daoud 2001; Walters 2003; among others). This special issue aims at introducing the readers to these different themes and how they play out in shaping the present and the future of the language situation in the country. In the wider sense, findings about the sociolinguistic situation of Tunisia can complement what we already know about the other countries in the Maghreb and open the door for comparative research on common issues for a more complete understanding of the linguistic situation in the region

Arabic cross-dialectal communication: A missing element in the Teaching of Arabic as a Second Language

This study was initiated by an ambition of contributing to the field of Teaching Arabic as a Second Language (TASL) through further examination of the issue of the variability in the Arabic language. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has been the main variety taught in Higher Education (HE) institutions in the UK with the majority of them encouraging the students to learn a dialect either by exposure or by seeking instruction during their year abroad (Dickins & Watson, 2006). In recent years, more institutions —especially in the USA— are giving attention to the importance of teaching the dialects alongside MSA and, therefore, some programmes started teaching at least one dialect at different stages of the degrees while others started the integrative approach by teaching both MSA and a dialect concurrently (Younes, 1995). This appreciation of the equal importance of MSA and the dialect is an achievement to be valued; however, the question of which dialect to be taught is still taking the attention of the TASL professionals. Some institutions take a practical approach in answering this question by choosing the dialect taught in their partner institutions in the Arab countries, or the dialect spoken by their appointed staff members, while others choose the dialects that they believe to be the most comprehensible to the rest of the Arabic speakers. This question of which form to teach originates from a continuous focus on the language itself and trying to find a specific form to teach as in the situation of teaching non-diglossic languages. As Giolfo & Sinatora indicate, there is a need to deviate from the dichotomous concept of Arabic having distinct forms to the acceptance of these varieties being used by the native speaker (NS) as facets of one language (Giolfo & Sinatora, 2011:104). Therefore, this paper proposes that the shift should divert from focusing on a specific form to focusing on the language use by the NS including the cross-dialectal communication. Whether an institution chooses to teach a Levantine, Egyptian or another dialect, more concern should be given to how the speakers of these dialects cope with such variability