You Tweet What You Speak: A City-Level Dataset of Arabic Dialects

Arabic has a wide range of varieties or dialects.Although a number of pioneering works have targeted some Arabic dialects, other dialects remain largely without investigation.A serious bottleneck for studying these dialects is lack of any data that can be exploited in computational models.In this work, we aim to bridge this gap: We present a considerably large dataset of > 1/4 billion tweets representing a wide range of dialects.Our dataset is more nuanced than previously reported work in that it is labeled at the fine-grained level of city.More specifically, the data represent 29 major Arab cities from 10 Arab countries with varying dialects (e.g., Egyptian, Gulf, KSA, Levantine, Yemeni).