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.
@InProceedings{HABASH18.395, author = {Nizar Habash and Fadhl Eryani and Salam Khalifa and Owen Rambow and Dana Abdulrahim and Alexander Erdmann and Reem Faraj and Wajdi Zaghouani and Houda Bouamor and Nasser Zalmout and Sara Hassan and Faisal Al shargi and Sakhar Alkhereyf and Basma Abdulkareem and Ramy Eskander and Mohammad Salameh and Hind Saddiki}, title = "{Unified Guidelines and Resources for Arabic Dialect Orthography}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }