Egyptian Arabic Language Data

Egyptian Arabic, also called Masri, is a collection of Arabic dialects spoken in Egypt. The main variant is sometimes called Standard Egyptian Arabic (although it is not officially standardized), and is primarily based on Cairene Arabic (the dialect from Cairo), with some loanwords from Modern Standard Arabic. This dialect is used in media not only throughout Egypt but also across the Arabic-speaking world.

As with Modern Standard Arabic, the main orthographic convention for Egyptian Arabic is to omit tashkil (used to indicate short vowels), and to include only consonant marking (i’jam) to indicate long vowels.

Volume of Language Data

Features

Non-inflectional POSs

The data contains all the forms, lemma, POS and morphological attributes (voice, tense, mood, transitivity, number, person, gender, case, state, pronominal-number, pronominal-person and pronominal-gender), for noninflectional POSs (determiners, pronouns, prepositions…), i.e. POSs not included in features Inflectional and derivational morphology.

Inflectional Morphology Data

The Lexical Resource for Egyptian Arabic contains all the forms for all POSs: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, numerals and particles.

Derivational Morphology Data

It also includes all derivational forms including adjectives derived from nouns (nisba) and verbal nouns or adverbs derived from adjectives.

Extended Morphology Data

The data also covers the result of extending the inflectional and derivational forms lists as a result of considering additional morphological phenomena such as common combinations of productive prefixes.

Relative frequency information for words in a corpus is included. Frequency expressed in the form of logarithmic “buckets” or “frequency groups” (from 255, the most common forms, to 0, the least common forms).

Complementary Semantic Annotations

Usage includes information regarding the usage of specific forms or lemmas. Words that are rarely used will be tagged as “rare”. Words borrowed from foreign languages that are not widely understood, or which are only meaningful as part of a larger phrase, will be tagged as “foreign”.

Words or spelling variations which are not officially recognized but are widely used in texting communication will be tagged as “non-standard”.

Offensive Language

Bitext provides data regarding offensive, vulgar and sensitive words with all the lemmas, POS and attributes. Offensive and vulgar words will be marked as “offensive” (highly offensive derogatory slurs based on race, sexual orientation, etc.). Vulgar words should be marked as “vulgar” (strong curse words).

Words that are sensitive should be marked “sensitive” (clinical names of genitalia, politically charged words, light curse words, etc.) Words that are not themselves offensive, vulgar, or sensitive, but could be part of potentially disturbing phrases will be marked as “sensitive-in-context”.

Categories

In Categories, the data regarding frequently used words with all the lemmas, POS and attributes are included. Frequently used words are considered to fall under, and will be tagged with, one of the following categories:

• • Animal
  • Apple Product (Apple-owned trademarks and product names)
  • Brandname (Well-known brands and products)
  • Body part
  • Cities
  • Clothing
  • Color
  • Computer
  • Family name
  • Female first name
  • Fruit/vegetable
  • Georegion (Names of regions not covered by the geopolitical names in the country/state/city/waterway categories)
  • Greetings (including multi-word expressions)
  • Male first name
  • Measures
  • Organization
  • Plant
  • Professions
  • Relation
  • Seasons
  • Sport
  • States
  • Transportation
  • Waterway (Names of rivers, lakes, oceans, etc.)
  • Weather