Homs Arabic: a linguistic profile

This research deals with the urban variety of Arabic spoken in the City of Homs, or Hims, the third important city in Syria situated in its biggest province.Several scholars have attempted a classification of the most important features of Arabic varieties, but none of these has described Homs Arabic, which is why this work is designed to provide a linguistic documentation of this local variety by defining the main phonological, morphological and syntactic features of al-lahža l-ḥumṣiyya, but also presenting some interesting aspects of Homs history and traditions

Gulf Arabic: Recent Data about the Variety Spoken in the Emirate of Dubai

The aim of this paper is to present some recent examples of the variety spoken in the well-known Emirate of Dubai, the second largest of the seven Emirates that constitute the federation, located in the South Eastern shore of the Arabian Peninsula. The study is based on data gathered by the author between 2015 and 2016 during her recent fieldwork in the UAE: the informants were young Emirati women aged between 20 and 30 years old. The purpose of the study is to contribute to the previous ones about Gulf Arabic, by presenting more recent examples and some morphological and syntactic features of the local variety in Dubai

Studies on Arabic Dialectology and Sociolinguistics

This volume contains over fifty articles related to various fields of modern Arabic dialectology. All the articles are revised and enhanced versions of papers read on the 12th Conference of the Association Internationale de Dialectologie Arabe (AIDA) held in Marseille in June 2017. Since its first conference in Paris in 1993, AIDA members gather every two years in different country. The collection of the AIDA proceedings offer an updated insight of the development of the field. During the past few decadesthe the study of Arabic dialects has become an important branch of research covering a wide range of subjects from phonological analyses, morphosyntax, semantics to pragmatics, sociolinguistics, folk linguistics, studies on literacy and writings, cultural and artistic practices, etc. As many articles of this volume illustrate, the study of Arabic dialects explores different aspects of the languages and cultures of the contemporary Arab world. A remarkable feature is the growing and constant participation of young scholars from all around the globe

Homs Arabic: First Issues

My paper deals with the Arabic spoken in the city of Hims (or Ḥomṣ) located in the Central part of Syria. The aim is to present the main data, collected after the beginning of the civil war in 2011. The recordings contain elements of dialect spoken by natives who decided to escape from Syria or who live abroad for personal reasons. The sources were gathered throughout Italy and various Arab countries such as United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Qatar. The linguistic analysis presents some peculiarities of Ḥomṣ Arabic (henceforth HA) on a phonological and morphological leve

SemEval-2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation (MCL-WiC)

In this paper, we introduce the first SemEval task on Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Wordin-Context disambiguation (MCL-WiC). This task allows the largely under-investigated inherent ability of systems to discriminate between word senses within and across languages to be evaluated, dropping the requirement of a fixed sense inventory. Framed as a binary classification, our task is divided into two parts. In the multilingual sub-task, participating systems are required to determine whether two target words, each occurring in a different context within the same language, express the same meaning or not. Instead, in the crosslingual part, systems are asked to perform the task in a cross-lingual scenario, in which the two target words and their corresponding contexts are provided in two different languages. We illustrate our task, as well as the construction of our manually-created dataset including five languages, namely Arabic, Chinese, English, French and Russian, and the results of the participating systems. Datasets and results are available at: https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/mcl-wic