A Morphological Analyzer for Egyptian Arabic

Abstract

Most tools and resources developed for natural language processing of Arabic are designed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and perform terribly on Arabic dialects, such as Egyptian Arabic. Egyptian Arabic differs from MSA phonologically, morphologically and lexically and has no standardized orthography. We present a linguistically accurate, large-scale morphological analyzer for Egyptian Arabic. The analyzer extends an existing resource, the Egyptian Colloquial Arabic Lexicon, and follows the part-of-speech guidelines used by the Linguistic Data Consortium for Egyptian Arabic. It accepts multiple orthographic variants and normalizes them to a conventional orthography. 1