Towards a Computational Lexicon for Moroccan Darija: Words, Idioms, and Constructions
In this paper, we explore the challenges of building a computational lexicon for Moroccan Darija (MD), an Arabic dialect spoken by over 32 million people worldwide but which only recently has begun appearing frequently in written form in social media. We raise the question of what belongs in such a lexicon and start by describing our work building traditional word-level lexicon entries with their English translations. We then discuss challenges in translating idiomatic MD text that led to creating multi-word expression lexicon entries whose meanings could not be fully derived from the individual words. Finally, we provide a preliminary exploration of constructions to be considered for inclusion in an MD constructicon by translating examples of English constructions and examining their MD counterparts.
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