Improved Arabic Dialect Classification with Social Media Data

Arabic dialect classification has been an important and challenging problem for Arabic language processing, especially for social media text analysis and machine translation. In this paper we propose an approach to improving Arabic dialect classification with semi-supervised learn-ing: multiple classifiers are trained with weakly supervised, strongly supervised, and unsupervised data. Their combination yields significant and consistent improve-ment on two different test sets. The dialect classification accuracy is improved by 5% over the strongly supervised classifier and 20 % over the weakly supervised classifier. Furthermore, when applying the improved dialect classifier to build a Modern Stan-dard Arabic (MSA) language model (LM), the new model size is reduced by 70% while the English-Arabic translation qual-ity is improved by 0.6 BLEU point.