Classification of Closely Related Sub-dialects of Arabic Using Support-Vector Machines

Colloquial dialects of Arabic can be roughly categorized into five groups based on relatedness and geographic location (Egyptian, North African/Maghrebi, Gulf, Iraqi, and Levantine), but given that all dialects utilize much of the same writing system and share overlapping features and vocabulary, dialect identification and text classification is no trivial task. Furthermore, text classification by dialect is often performed at a coarse-grained level into these five groups or a subset thereof, and there is little work on sub-dialectal classification. The current study utilizes an n-gram based SVM to classify on a fine-grained sub-dialectal level, and compares it to methods used in dialect classification such as vocabulary pruning of shared items across dialects. A test case of the dialect Levantine is presented here, and results of 65% accuracy on a four-way classification experiment to sub-dialects of Levantine (Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian) are presented and discussed. This paper also examines the possibility of leveraging existing mixed-dialectal resources to determine their sub-dialectal makeup by automatic classification.