NERDz: A Preliminary Dataset of Named Entities for Algerian

Abstract

This paper introduces a first step towards creating the NERDz dataset. A manually annotated dataset of named entities for the Algerian vernacular dialect. The annotations are built on top of a recent extension to the Algerian NArabizi Treebank, comprizing NArabizi sentences with manual transliterations into Arabic and code-switched scripts. NERDz is therefore not only the first dataset of named entities for Algerian, but it also comprises parallel entities written in Latin, Arabic, and code-switched scripts. We present a detailed overview of our annotations, inter-annotator agreement measures, and define two preliminary baselines using a neural sequence labeling approach and an Algerian BERT model. We also make the annotation guidelines and the annotations available for future work.