# The interplay between language similarity and script on a novel multi-layer Algerian dialect corpus

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07400 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07400/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [BERT Post-Training for Review Reading Comprehension and Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02232/) (2019)
- [Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00914/) (2018)
- [Are All Languages Equally Hard to Language-Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03743/) (2018)
- [What Kind of Language Is Hard to Language-Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04726/) (2019)
- [Universal Dependency Parsing from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10457/) (2019)
- [Pushing the Limits of Low-Resource Morphological Inflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05838/) (2019)
- [SentiPers: A Sentiment Analysis Corpus for Persian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07737/) (2018)
- [Can Multilingual Language Models Transfer to an Unseen Dialect? A Case Study on North African Arabizi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00318/) (2020)
- [Assessing State-of-the-Art Sentiment Models on State-of-the-Art Sentiment Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04219/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Does Manipulating Tokenization Aid Cross-Lingual Transfer? A Study on POS Tagging for Non-Standardized Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10158/) (2023)
- [DziriBERT: a Pre-trained Language Model for the Algerian Dialect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12346/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Code-switched Arabic NLP: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13419/) (2025)
- [Enriching the NArabizi Treebank: A Multifaceted Approach to Supporting an Under-Resourced Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14866/) (2023)
- [Biomedical Machine Translation for Low-Resource Arabic-Script Languages via Cross-Lingual Transfer and LoRA Adapter Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22300/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have seen a rise in interest for cross-lingual transfer between languages with similar typology, and between languages of various scripts. However, the interplay between language similarity and difference in script on cross-lingual transfer is a less studied problem. We explore this interplay on cross-lingual transfer for two supervised tasks, namely part-of-speech tagging and sentiment analysis. We introduce a newly annotated corpus of Algerian user-generated comments comprising parallel annotations of Algerian written in Latin, Arabic, and code-switched scripts, as well as annotations for sentiment and topic categories. We perform baseline experiments by fine-tuning multi-lingual language models. We further explore the effect of script vs. language similarity in cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning multi-lingual models on languages which are a) typologically distinct, but use the same script, b) typologically similar, but use a distinct script, or c) are typologically similar and use the same script. We find there is a delicate relationship between script and typology for part-of-speech, while sentiment analysis is less sensitive.