A Large Scale Corpus of Gulf Arabic
Table 2: Distribution of Dialects across the Gumar Corpus
['Dialect', 'Percentage']
We have observed that 92% of the entire corpus is actually written in GA with SA being the most dominant and BH the least. There is also around 10% that is identified as GA (other) which are the cases of a novel containing a combination of several GA dialects that is due to multiple writers with different dialects or due to the existence of different characters in the novel. It was sometimes hard to differentiate through the text between the three dialects of OM, QA and AE even with a native speaker annotating, hence these cases we marked as GA (other) also. The rest of the corpus (7.93%) is mostly MSA (original text or translation attempts of existing non Arabic text) and other DA such as Egyptian, Iraqi, Levantine, … etc.