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An Empirical Analysis of Moroccan Dialectal User-Generated Text

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Computational Collective Intelligence (ICCCI 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11684))

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Abstract

With the increase of web use in Morocco today, Internet has become an important source of information. Specifically, across social media, Moroccan people use several languages in their communication leaving behind unstructured user-generated text that present several opportunities for Natural Language Processing. Among languages found in this data, Moroccan Dialectal Arabic stands with an important content and several features. In this paper, we investigate online written text generated by Moroccan users in social media with an emphasis on Moroccan Dialectal Arabic. For this purpose, we follow several steps, using some tools such as a language identification system, in order to conduct a deep study of this data. The most interesting findings that have emerged is the use of code switching, multi-script and low amount of words in Moroccan UGT text.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to Hootsuite https://hootsuite.com.

  2. 2.

    http://www.internetworldstats.com.

  3. 3.

    http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/morocco.

  4. 4.

    http://rgph2014.hcp.ma.

  5. 5.

    http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/morocco.

  6. 6.

    https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights.

  7. 7.

    Using Facebook Page Post Scraper https://github.com/minimaxir/facebook-page-post-scraper.

  8. 8.

    https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/.

  9. 9.

    http://arabic.emi.ac.ma/safar/.

  10. 10.

    http://arabic.emi.ac.ma:8080/MCAP/faces/lid.xhtml;jsessionid=834e738ebfc626d2b431beac006c.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the student annotators and their Professors Jamal Ezzouaine and Hakima Khamar from Mohammed V University in Rabat for their efforts on the annotation of the Moroccan user-generated text, which were necessary to classify this content according to languages.

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Correspondence to Ridouane Tachicart or Karim Bouzoubaa .

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Tachicart, R., Bouzoubaa, K. (2019). An Empirical Analysis of Moroccan Dialectal User-Generated Text. In: Nguyen, N., Chbeir, R., Exposito, E., Aniorté, P., Trawiński, B. (eds) Computational Collective Intelligence. ICCCI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11684. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28374-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28374-2_1

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