Similarities between Arabic Dialects: Investigating Geographical Proximity

Understand

The automatic classification of Arabic dialects is an ongoing research challenge, which has been explored in recent work that defines dialects based on increasingly limited geographic areas like cities and provinces.

• This paper focuses on a related yet relatively unexplored topic: the effects of the geographical proximity of cities located in Arab countries on their dialectical similarity.
• Our work is twofold, reliant on: 1) comparing the textual similarities between dialects using cosine similarity and 2) measuring the geographical distance between locations.
• We study MADAR and NADI, two established datasets with Arabic dialects from many cities and provinces.