# A Survey of Code-switched Arabic NLP: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13419 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13419/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 203 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10020/) (2022)
- [GLUECoS : An Evaluation Benchmark for Code-Switched NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12376/) (2020)
- [LinCE: A Centralized Benchmark for Linguistic Code-switching Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04322/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Code-switched Speech and Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00784/) (2019)
- [AraT5: Text-to-Text Transformers for Arabic Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12068/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Code-switching: Linguistic and Social Perspectives for Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01967/) (2023)
- [Are Multilingual Models Effective in Code-Switching?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13309/) (2021)
- [Prompting Multilingual Large Language Models to Generate Code-Mixed Texts: The Case of South East Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13592/) (2023)
- [Arabic Dialect Identification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06557/) (2020)
- [Towards One Model to Rule All: Multilingual Strategy for Dialectal Code-Switching Arabic ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14779/) (2021)
- [QASR: QCRI Aljazeera Speech Resource -- A Large Scale Annotated Arabic Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13000/) (2021)
- [GPTAraEval: A Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Arabic NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14976/) (2023)
- [Overview for the Second Shared Task on Language Identification in Code-Switched Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13016/) (2019)
- [NADI 2023: The Fourth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16117/) (2023)
- [ALDi: Quantifying the Arabic Level of Dialectness of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13747/) (2023)
- [NADI 2024: The Fifth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04910/) (2024)
- [Dolphin: A Challenging and Diverse Benchmark for Arabic NLG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14989/) (2023)
- [Anonymizing Speech with Generative Adversarial Networks to Preserve Speaker Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07002/) (2022)
- [Challenges of Computational Processing of Code-Switching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02213/) (2016)
- [Privacy in Social Media: Identification, Mitigation and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02191/) (2018)
- [Arabic Code-Switching Speech Recognition using Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01573/) (2021)
- [Arabizi Detection and Conversion to Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.6755/) (2013)
- [Investigations on Speech Recognition Systems for Low-Resource Dialectal Arabic-English Code-Switching Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12881/) (2021)
- [Can Multilingual Language Models Transfer to an Unseen Dialect? A Case Study on North African Arabizi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00318/) (2020)
- [ArzEn-ST: A Three-way Speech Translation Corpus for Code-Switched Egyptian Arabic - English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12000/) (2022)
- [Arabic Dialect Identification under Scrutiny: Limitations of Single-label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13661/) (2023)
- [Mixat: A Data Set of Bilingual Emirati-English Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02578/) (2024)
- [Is it Great or Terrible? Preserving Sentiment in Neural Machine Translation of Arabic Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13814/) (2020)
- [Investigating Code-Mixed Modern Standard Arabic-Egyptian to English Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13573/) (2021)
- [Textual Data Augmentation for Arabic-English Code-Switching Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02550/) (2022)

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

- [Tell me Habibi, is it Real or Fake?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22581/) (2025)
- [MathMist: A Parallel Multilingual Benchmark Dataset for Mathematical Problem Solving and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14305/) (2025)
- [Ara-HOPE: Human-Centric Post-Editing Evaluation for Dialectal Arabic to Modern Standard Arabic Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21787/) (2025)
- [The Impact of Code-switched Synthetic Data Quality is Task Dependent: Insights from MT and ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23576/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Analysis of Arabic Natural Language Processing Research: Trends, Topic Evolution, and Research Gaps -- A Bibliometric and Topic-Based Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23421/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language in the Arab world presents a complex diglossic and multilingual setting, involving the use of Modern Standard Arabic, various dialects and sub-dialects, as well as multiple European languages. This diverse linguistic landscape has given rise to code-switching, both within Arabic varieties and between Arabic and foreign languages. The widespread occurrence of code-switching across the region makes it vital to address these linguistic needs when developing language technologies. In this paper, we provide a review of the current literature in the field of code-switched Arabic NLP, offering a broad perspective on ongoing efforts, challenges, research gaps, and recommendations for future research directions.