Advancing AI-Driven Linguistic Analysis: Developing and Annotating Comprehensive Arabic Dialect Corpora for Gulf Countries and Saudi Arabia

Abstract

This study harnesses the linguistic diversity of Arabic dialects to create two expansive corpora from X (formerly Twitter). The Gulf Arabic Corpus (GAC-6) includes around 1.7 million tweets from six Gulf countries—Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, and Bahrain—capturing a wide range of linguistic variations. The Saudi Dialect Corpus (SDC-5) comprises 790,000 tweets, offering in-depth insights into five major regional dialects of Saudi Arabia: Hijazi, Najdi, Southern, Northern, and Eastern, reflecting the complex linguistic landscape of the region. Both corpora are thoroughly annotated with dialect-specific seed words and geolocation data, achieving high levels of accuracy, as indicated by Cohen’s Kappa scores of 0.78 for GAC-6 and 0.90 for SDC-5. The annotation process leverages AI-driven techniques, including machine learning algorithms for automated dialect recognition and feature extraction, to enhance the granularity and precision of the data. These resources significantly contribute to the field of Arabic dialectology and facilitate the development of AI algorithms for linguistic data analysis, enhancing AI system design and efficiency. The data provided by this research are crucial for advancing AI methodologies, supporting diverse applications in the realm of next-generation AI technologies.