# Enriching the NArabizi Treebank: A Multifaceted Approach to Supporting an Under-Resourced Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14866 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14866/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10643/) (2020)
- [MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11811/) (2021)
- [CharacterBERT: Reconciling ELMo and BERT for Word-Level Open-Vocabulary Representations From Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10392/) (2020)
- [NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09648/) (2022)
- [Neural Modeling for Named Entities and Morphology (NEMO^2)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15620/) (2020)
- [DziriBERT: a Pre-trained Language Model for the Algerian Dialect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12346/) (2021)
- [Can Multilingual Language Models Transfer to an Unseen Dialect? A Case Study on North African Arabizi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00318/) (2020)
- [Treebanking User-Generated Content: a UD Based Overview of Guidelines, Corpora and Unified Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02063/) (2020)
- [Can Character-based Language Models Improve Downstream Task Performance in Low-Resource and Noisy Language Scenarios?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13658/) (2021)
- [The interplay between language similarity and script on a novel multi-layer Algerian dialect corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07400/) (2021)
- [Building an Endangered Language Resource in the Classroom: Universal Dependencies for Kakataibo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10343/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Natural Language Processing for Dialects of a Language: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05632/) (2024)
- [Universal NER: A Gold-Standard Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09122/) (2023)
- [Toxic language detection: a systematic review of Arabic datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07228/) (2023)
- [Romanized Arabic Across Dialects: Views, Usage Patterns, and Linguistic Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02555/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper we address the scarcity of annotated data for NArabizi, a Romanized form of North African Arabic used mostly on social media, which poses challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP). We introduce an enriched version of NArabizi Treebank (Seddah et al., 2020) with three main contributions: the addition of two novel annotation layers (named entity recognition and offensive language detection) and a re-annotation of the tokenization, morpho-syntactic and syntactic layers that ensure annotation consistency. Our experimental results, using different tokenization schemes, showcase the value of our contributions and highlight the impact of working with non-gold tokenization for NER and dependency parsing. To facilitate future research, we make these annotations publicly available. Our enhanced NArabizi Treebank paves the way for creating sophisticated language models and NLP tools for this under-represented language.