Automatic building of Arabic multi dialect text corpora by bootstrapping dialect words

The principle objective of this work is to build multi dialect Arabic texts corpora using a web corpus as a resource. A survey has been conducted to categorize distinct words and phrases that are common to a specific dialect only, and not used in other dialects, the purpose being to download a specific dialect text corpus. From this experiment we obtained 48M tokens from different Arabic dialects. These dialects were categorised into four main dialects Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian and North African, resulting in 14.5M, 10.4M, 13M and 10.1M tokens being obtained respectively. The total number of distinct types in all the corpora is 2M types. In this paper we describe how the corpora were constructed by using distinct words.