Computational Processing of Spoken North Israeli Arabic

We present work in progress whose main objective is the creation of a dictionary of Arabic dialects spoken in the northern part of Israel. The dictionary will be based on recorded samples of spontaneous speech as well as detailed linguistic questionnaires. The spoken data are manually transcribed to a narrow phonemic system of notation. The transcribed texts are analyzed morphologically using a set of morphophonological rules, written as regular expressions and processed with the Xerox Finite-State Tools software. The results will be used to construct a comprehensive dictionary, a series of grammars and a Sprachatlas. The formalized rules will also be used to measure the variation among different dialects.