YouDACC: the Youtube Dialectal Arabic Commentary Corpus

In the Arab world, while Modern Standard Arabic is commonly used in formal written context, on sites like Youtube, people are increasingly using Dialectal Arabic, the language for everyday use to comment on a video and interact with the community. These user-contributed comments along with the video and user attributes, offer a rich source of multi-dialectal Arabic sentences and expressions from different countries in the Arab world. This paper presents YOUDACC, an automatically annotated large-scale multi-dialectal Arabic corpus collected from user comments on Youtube videos. Our corpus covers different groups of dialects: Egyptian (EG), Gulf (GU), Iraqi (IQ), Maghrebi (MG) and Levantine (LV). We perform an empirical analysis on the crawled corpus and demonstrate that our location-based proposed method is effective for the task of dialect labeling.