# Arabic Multi-Dialect Segmentation: bi-LSTM-CRF vs. SVM

Source: [Arabic Multi-Dialect Segmentation: bi-LSTM-CRF vs. SVM](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa639e1e209131ce9ffc2c>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-12-24T01:10:43.680Z

Authors: Mohamed Eldesouki, Younes Samih, Ahmed Abdelali, Mohammed Attia, Hamdy Mubarak, Kareem Darwish, Kallmeyer Laura

Published: 2017-08-19T19:52:36.000Z

## Abstract

Arabic word segmentation is essential for a variety of NLP applications such as machine translation and information retrieval. Segmentation entails breaking words into their constituent stems, affixes and clitics. In this paper, we compare two approaches for segmenting four major Arabic dialects using only several thousand training examples for each dialect. The two approaches involve posing the problem as a ranking problem, where an SVM ranker picks the best segmentation, and as a sequence labeling problem, where a bi-LSTM RNN coupled with CRF determines where best to segment words. We are able to achieve solid segmentation results for all dialects using rather limited training data. We also show that employing Modern Standard Arabic data for domain adaptation and assuming context independence improve overall results.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Arabic Dialect Segmentation on Egyptian dialect (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/arabic-dialect-segmentation-on-egyptian-dialect-test.md>): Arabic Dialect Segmentation; Egyptian dialect (test); Accuracy: 95.

- [Arabic Dialect Segmentation on Levantine dialect (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/arabic-dialect-segmentation-on-levantine-dialect-test.md>): Arabic Dialect Segmentation; Levantine dialect (test); Accuracy: 93.3.

- [Arabic Dialect Segmentation on Gulf dialect (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/arabic-dialect-segmentation-on-gulf-dialect-test.md>): Arabic Dialect Segmentation; Gulf dialect (test); Accuracy: 93.1.

- [Arabic Dialect Segmentation on Maghrebi dialect (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/arabic-dialect-segmentation-on-maghrebi-dialect-test.md>): Arabic Dialect Segmentation; Maghrebi dialect (test); Accuracy: 91.2.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.05891>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.05891.pdf>)

[Implementation](<https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/tj/svm_light/svm_rank.html>)