Expressions in Dialectal Arabic

In this paper we describe a framework for classifying and annotating Egyptian Ara-bic Multiword Expressions (EMWE) in a specialized computational lexical re-source. The framework intends to en-compass comprehensive linguistic infor-mation for each MWE including: a. pho-nological and orthographic information; b. POS tags; c. structural information for the phrase structure of the expression; d. lexicographic classification; e. semantic classification covering semantic fields and semantic relations; f. degree of idio-maticity where we adopt a three-level rat-ing scale; g. pragmatic information in the form of usage labels; h. Modern Standard Arabic equivalents and English transla-tions, thereby rendering our resource