Putting Figures on Influences on M oroccan D arija from A rabic, F rench and S panish using the W ord N et (2018)

Abstract: Moroccan Darija is a variant of Arabic with many influences. Using the Open Multilingual WordNet (OMW), we compare the lemmas in the Moroccan Darija Wordnet (MDW) with the standard Arabic, French and Spanish ones. We then compared the lemmas in each synset with their translation equivalents. Transliteration is used to bridge alphabet differences and match lemmas in the closest phonological way. The results put figures on the similarity Moroccan Darija has with Arabic, French and Spanish: respectively 42.0%, 2.8% and 2.2%.

## introduction locally known as darija and referred to as a dialect, the moroccan variant of the arabic language is spoken by the overwhelming majority of moroccans (hcp, 2014) with small regional differences. the moroccan darija wordnet (mdw) @xcite was released as part of the open multilingual wordnet (omw) @xcite , thereby linking all the languages in the omw to moroccan darija. morocco has a complex language situation. its two official languages are arabic, the basis of moroccan darija, and, since 2011, tamazight. the north african kingdom has gained its independence in 1956 from colonial france and spain, and both countries have had linguistic influence on moroccan darija through loanwords. moroccan darija is used in day-to-day informal communication @xcite and doesn't have the prestige associated with arabic or french, which are the languages used in education. in the 2014 census @xcite , it was reported that morocco's literacy rate is at 67.8%, making it one of the lowest in the arab world. a 2010 study @xcite found that although the reasons of high illiteracy rates in the arab world are varied and subject to controversy, one of them was the "disconnect between high arabic used as the medium of instruction in schools and the various dialects of arabic spoken in arab region". this paper aims at putting figures on the influences of the arabic, french and spanish languages on moroccan darija. accordingly, on top of the mdw, the arabic @xcite , french @xcite and spanish @xcite wordnets were used. to gauge the influence of these languages on moroccan darija, the word distance between each moroccan lemma and its corresponding lemma in the other language was computed. this is done using the sense-based property of the wordnet. transliteration helped to bridge the difference between the arabic and latin alphabets and the difference of use of the latin alphabet between the european languages studied. the language-dialect similarities were computed for both the automatically linked moroccan synsets, as well as the manually validated ones. ## related work in this section, we describe relevant aspects of the mdw. then, we provide a review of studies on language-dialect and dialect-dialect similarity, as well as a review of methods to compute word-toword similarity. ## estimating influences to compare moroccan darija with arabic, french and spanish, we will perform word-to-word comparisons. these comparisons must be phonologically accurate despite alphabet differences. ## results and discussion the aggregated results of the word-to-word comparisons gave an estimation of the linguistic influences on moroccan darija. we obtained results for the moroccan synsets that were automatically linked and the ones that were manually validated. each of the arabic, french and spanish wordnets had a certain number of links to moroccan synsets for which they had at least one available single-word lemma. to these synsets, a certain number of lemmas were associated. in both comparisons, the moroccan lemmas were matched for pairwise comparisons. based on that number of synsets matched, an average normalised levenshtein distance was given for both languages. examining the results, we decided that synsets should only be counted as a match if they had at least 60% similarity. ## summary in this paper, we attempted to put figures on the similarity between moroccan darija and each of arabic, french and spanish. transliteration was used to bridge the alphabet gap and perform phonological comparisons. the methods used were flexible and the comparisons exploited all possible transliterations for each letter. transliteration was one-way from the moroccan darija wordnet @xcite for the french @xcite and @xcite wordnets, but was both ways for the comparison with the arabic wordnet @xcite . the word-to-word distance was computed using levenshtein distance @xcite , which was normalised @xcite using the biggest word length in the word pair @xcite . multiword expressions were ignored for the comparisons. the comparisons using the automatically linked moroccan synsets gave that moroccan darija has an average normalised levenshtein distance of 0.4619 with arabic, 0.7337 with french and 0.7521 with spanish. the percentage of synsets with word pairs that were at least 60% similar is 42.02% for arabic, 2.79% for french and 2.18% for spanish. there remained 2,763 moroccan synsets of unknown origin out of those linked to the omw. some have origins in arabic, french or spanish due to errors in linking, whereas others were found to have links to tamazight. the comparisons using the manually validated moroccan synsets yielded an average normalised levenshtein distance of 0.4393 with arabic, 0.7544 with french and 0.7721 with spanish, with the percentage of synsets with word pairs that were at least 60% similar is 47.00% for arabic, 3.08% for french and 2.92% for spanish. the results for the normalised levenshtein distance can be considered as a validation, but the number of word pairs that were at least 60% similar is too small to give a clear validation. the similarity between moroccan darija and arabic is closest to the one between @xcite and galician @xcite , that are two independent languages. this shows that moroccan darija may be considered a language of its own. nonetheless, there is no case of wordnet dialect-language or variantlanguage comparison to confirm this hypothesis.