Question: What variants are there in Arabic?
Evidence: Many recent papers have focused on the detection of offensive language, including hate speech BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10, BIBREF11, BIBREF12, BIBREF13. Offensive language can be categorized as: Vulgar, which include explicit and rude sexual references, Pornographic, and Hateful, which includes offensive remarks concerning people’s race, religion, country, etc. BIBREF14. Prior works have concentrated on building annotated corpora and training classification models. Concerning corpora, hatespeechdata.com attempts to maintain an updated list of hate speech corpora for multiple languages including Arabic and English. Further, SemEval 2019 ran an evaluation task targeted at detecting offensive language, which focused exclusively on English BIBREF15. As for classification models, most studies used supervised classification at either word level BIBREF10, character sequence level BIBREF11, and word embeddings BIBREF9. The studies used different classification techniques including using Naïve Bayes BIBREF10, SVM BIBREF11, and deep learning BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF12 classification. The accuracy of the aforementioned system ranged between 76% and 90%. Earlier work looked at the use of sentiment words as features as well as contextual features BIBREF13.
The work on Arabic offensive language detection is relatively nascent BIBREF16, BIBREF17, BIBREF18, BIBREF19, BIBREF5. Mubarak et al. mubarak2017abusive suggested that certain users are more likely to use offensive languages than others, and they used this insight to build a list of offensive Arabic words and they constructed a labeled set of 1,100 tweets. Abozinadah et al. abozinadah2017detecting used supervised classification based on a variety of features including user profile features, textual features, and network features. They reported an accuracy of nearly 90%. Alakrot et al. alakrot2018towards used supervised classification based on word unigrams and n-grams to detect offensive language in YouTube comments. They improved classification with stemming and achieved a precision of 88%. Albadi et al. albadi2018they focused on detecting religious hate speech using a recurrent neural network. Further; Schmidt and Wiegand schmidt-wiegand-2017-survey surveyed major works on hate speech detection; Fortuna and Nunes Fortuna2018Survey provided a comprehensive survey for techniques and works done in the area between 2004 and 2017.
Arabic is a morphologically rich language with a standard variety, namely Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and is typically used in formal communication, and many dialectal varieties that differ from MSA in lexical selection, morphology, and syntactic structures. For MSA, words are typically derived from a set of thousands of roots by fitting a root into a stem template and the resulting stem may accept a variety of prefixes and suffixes such as coordinating conjunctions and pronouns. Though word segmentation (or stemming) is quite accurate for MSA BIBREF20, with accuracy approaching 99%, dialectal segmentation is not sufficiently reliable, with accuracy ranging between 91-95% for different dialects BIBREF21. Since dialectal Arabic is ubiquitous in Arabic tweets and many tweets have creative spellings of words, recent work on Arabic offensive language detection used character-level models BIBREF5.
Arabic is a morphologically rich language with a standard variety called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is typically used in formal communication, and many dialectal varieties that differ from MSA in lexical selection, morphology, phonology, and syntactic structures.
Answer: Arabic is a morphologically rich language with a standard variety called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is typically used in formal communication, and many dialectal varieties that differ from MSA in lexical selection, morphology, phonology, and syntactic structures.