Arabizi Identification in Twitter Data
In this work we explore some challenges related to analysing one form of the Arabic language called Arabizi. Arabizi, a portmanteau of Araby Englizi, meaning Arabic English, is a digital trend in texting Non Standard Arabic using Latin script. Arabizi users express their natural dialectal Arabic in text without following a unified orthography. We address the challenge of identifying Arabizi from multi lingual data in Twitter, a preliminary step for analysing sentiment from Arabizi data. We annotated a corpus of Twitter data streamed across two Arab countries, extracted linguistic features and trained a classifier achieving an average Arabizi identification accuracy of 94.5% We also present the percentage of Arabizi usage on Twitter across both countries providing important insights for researchers in NLP and sociolinguistics.
ACL