Mapping Rules for Building a Tunisian Dialect Lexicon and Generating Corpora
Rahma Boujelbane, Mariem Ellouze, Lamia Hadrich Belguith · International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing · 2013
Nowadays in tunisia, the arabic Tunisian Dialect (TD) has become progressively used in interviews, news and debate programs instead of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Thus, this gave birth to a new kind of language. Indeed, the majority of speech is no longer made in MSA but alternates between MSA and TD. This situation has important negative consequences on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): since the spoken dialects are not officially written and do not have a standard orthography, it is very costly to obtain adequate annotated corpora to use for training language models and building vocabulary. There are neither parallel corpora involving Tunisian dialect and MSA nor dictionaries. In this paper, we describe a method for building a bilingual dictionary using explicit knowledge about the relation between TD and MSA. We also present an automatic process for creating Tunisian Dialect