Guidelines and Annotation Framework for Arabic Author Profiling

In this paper, we present the annotation pipeline and the guidelines we wrote as part of an effort to create a large manually annotated Arabic author profiling dataset from various social media sources covering 16 Arabic countries and 11 dialectal regions. The target size of the annotated ARAP-Tweet corpus is more than 2.4 million words. We illustrate and summarize our general and dialect-specific guidelines for each of the dialectal regions selected. We also present the annotation framework and logistics. We control the annotation quality frequently by computing the inter-annotator agreement during the annotation process. Finally, we describe the issues encountered during the annotation phase, especially those related to the peculiarities of Arabic dialectal varieties as used in social media.

Arap-Tweet: A Large Multi-Dialect Twitter Corpus for Gender, Age and Language Variety Identification

In this paper, we present Arap-Tweet, which is a large-scale and multi-dialectal corpus of Tweets from 11 regions and 16 countries in the Arab world representing the major Arabic dialectal varieties. To build this corpus, we collected data from Twitter and we provided a team of experienced annotators with annotation guidelines that they used to annotate the corpus for age categories, gender, and dialectal variety. During the data collection effort, we based our search on distinctive keywords that are specific to the different Arabic dialects and we also validated the location using Twitter API. In this paper, we report on the corpus data collection and annotation efforts. We also present some issues that we encountered during these phases. Then, we present the results of the evaluation performed to ensure the consistency of the annotation. The provided corpus will enrich the limited set of available language resources for Arabic and will be an invaluable enabler for developing author profiling tools and NLP tools for Arabic.