Diwan: A dialectal word annotation tool for arabic

Abstract

This paper presents DIWAN, an annotation interface for Arabic dialectal texts. While the Arabic dialects differ in many respects from each other and from Modern Standard Arabic, they also have much in common. To facilitate annotation and to make it as efficient as possible, it is therefore not advisable to treat each Arabic dialect as a separate language, unrelated to the other variants of Arabic. Instead, we make analyses from other variants available to the annotator, who then can choose to use them or not.