Toward Micro-Dialect Identification in Diaglossic and Code-Switched Environments

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Chiyu Zhang, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Lyle Ungar

Computational Social Science and Social Media Long Paper

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Abstract: Although prediction of dialects is an important language processing task, with a wide range of applications, existing work is largely limited to coarse-grained varieties. Inspired by geolocation research, we propose the novel task of Micro-Dialect Identification (MDI) and introduce MARBERT, a new language model with striking abilities to predict a fine-grained variety (as small as that of a city) given a single, short message. For modeling, we offer a range of novel spatially and linguistically-motivated multi-task learning models. To showcase the utility of our models, we introduce a new, large-scale dataset of Arabic micro-varieties (low-resource) suited to our tasks. MARBERT predicts micro-dialects with 9.9% F1,  76 better than a majority class baseline. Our new language model also establishes new state-ofthe- art on several external tasks.
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