darija-dictionary

Having advanced IT solutions that are well adapted to the Moroccan context passes inevitably through understanding Moroccan dialect. Hence, darija (Moroccan dialect) should be an active player in the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP).

However, it turns out that step 0 in any serious engagement with darija in NLP will consist of translating its vocabulary to the widely used and most documented language in this field, namely English.

This open source project aims to be a reference in addressing this issue. We hope for the contribution of the Moroccan IT community in order to build up the largest dataset of darija-english vocabulary which will serve as a pedestal for any future application of NLP to benefit Moroccan people.

---

---

How to contribute

We've made a tutorial for you in DODa's website

---

Guidelines / Recommendations

• 3ndk ح dir ح xD (shout-out to this guy 😆), often try to use:

darija	3	7	9	8	2 - 'a' - 'i'	5 - 'kh'
arabic	ع	ح	ق	ه	همزة	خ

• Try to use capitalization to differentiate between the following letters:

t	T	s	S	d	D
ت	ط	س	ص	د	ض

• Arabic characters with two-letters Latin equivalent:

Arabic alphabet	ش	غ	خ
Latin alphabet	ch	gh	kh

• Double characters to refer to the emphasis or "الشدة":

darija	7mam	7mmam
english	pigeons	bathroom

• We usually don't add "e" in the end of darija words : louz instead of louze

• We usually don't use "Z" or "th" for ظ ، ذ ، ث , because we generally don't use these letters in darija (except in northern Morocco, but for the sake of simplicity, we are focusing primarily on standard darija)

• When using apostrophes or commas, don't forget to surround the expression by quotation marks (as we are working on csv files)

"don't"

• We use spaces as word delimiters, not _ nor - : thank you instead of thank_you

• Respect the number of columns in every row you add, you can use empty quotation marks "" in case you don't have extra variations

• In every row, always start with the most used form (in your opinion of course) of the word in question

• For future use of this dataset to train deep neural networks, try to reserve each row to similar variations of the same word. For instance, "sou9" and "marchi" both translate to "market", yet it's better to separate them into two different rows:

"sou9","souk","souq","market"

"marchi","","","market"

• verbs.csv: The darija translation is reserved to the past tense of the third pronoun "he", whereas the other pronouns and tenses are handled in separate files. The English translation present the basic form (or root) of the English verb.

"ghnna","ghenna","ghanna","","","","sing"

• masculine_feminine_plural.csv: If it does exist, feminine-plural translation column is for nouns. Regarding adjectives feminine-plural = feminine.

Citation

@misc{outchakoucht2021moroccan,
      title={Moroccan Dialect -Darija- Open Dataset},
      author={Aissam Outchakoucht and Hamza Es-Samaali},
      year={2021},
      eprint={2103.09687},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}