Language in the Arab world presents a complex diglossic and multilingual setting, involving the use of Modern Standard Arabic, various dialects and sub-dialects, as well as multiple European languages. This diverse linguistic landscape has given rise to code-switching, both within Arabic varieties and between Arabic and foreign languages. The widespread occurrence of code-switching across the region makes it vital to address these linguistic needs when developing language technologies. In this paper, we provide a review of the current literature in the field of code-switched Arabic NLP, offering a broad perspective on ongoing efforts, challenges, research gaps, and recommendations for future research directions.

We present ZAEBUC-Spoken, a multilingual multidialectal Arabic-English speech corpus. The corpus comprises twelve hours of Zoom meetings involving multiple speakers role-playing a work situation where Students brainstorm ideas for a certain topic and then discuss it with an Interlocutor. The meetings cover different topics and are divided into phases with different language setups. The corpus presents a challenging set for automatic speech recognition (ASR), including two languages (Arabic and English) with Arabic spoken in multiple variants (Modern Standard Arabic, Gulf Arabic, and Egyptian Arabic) and English used with various accents. Adding to the complexity of the corpus, there is also code-switching between these languages and dialects. As part of our work, we take inspiration from established sets of transcription guidelines to present a set of guidelines handling issues of conversational speech, code-switching and orthography of both languages. We further enrich the corpus with two layers of annotations; (1) dialectness level annotation for the portion of the corpus where mixing occurs between different variants of Arabic, and (2) automatic morphological annotations, including tokenization, lemmatization, and part-of-speech tagging.

Visual Question Answering~(VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, which requires models to understand and reason on knowledge present in visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA datasets and models are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images that are Western-centric. While recent efforts have tried to increase the number of languages covered on VQA datasets, they still lack diversity in low-resource languages. More importantly, some datasets extend the text to other languages, either via translation or some other approaches, but usually keep the same images, resulting in narrow cultural representation. To address these limitations, we create CVQA, a new Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering benchmark dataset, designed to cover a rich set of languages and regions, where we engage native speakers and cultural experts in the data collection process. CVQA includes culturally-driven images and questions from across 28 countries in four continents, covering 26 languages with 11 scripts, providing a total of 9k questions. We benchmark several Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on CVQA, and we show that the dataset is challenging for the current state-of-the-art models. This benchmark will serve as a probing evaluation suite for assessing the cultural bias of multimodal models and hopefully encourage more research efforts towards increasing cultural awareness and linguistic diversity in this field.

Data sparsity is one of the main challenges posed by code-switching (CS), which is further exacerbated in the case of morphologically rich languages.For the task of machine translation (MT), morphological segmentation has proven successful in alleviating data sparsity in monolingual contexts; however, it has not been investigated for CS settings.In this paper, we study the effectiveness of different segmentation approaches on MT performance, covering morphology-based and frequency-based segmentation techniques.We experiment on MT from code-switched Arabic-English to English.We provide detailed analysis, examining a variety of conditions, such as data size and sentences with different degrees of CS.Empirical results show that morphology-aware segmenters perform the best in segmentation tasks but under-perform in MT.Nevertheless, we find that the choice of the segmentation setup to use for MT is highly dependent on the data size.For extreme low-resource scenarios, a combination of frequency and morphology-based segmentations is shown to perform the best.For more resourced settings, such a combination does not bring significant improvements over the use of frequency-based segmentation.

Code-switching poses a number of challenges and opportunities for multilingual automatic speech recognition. In this paper, we focus on the question of robust and fair evaluation metrics. To that end, we develop a reference benchmark data set of code-switching speech recognition hypotheses with human judgments. We define clear guidelines for minimal editing of automatic hypotheses. We validate the guidelines using 4-way inter-annotator agreement. We evaluate a large number of metrics in terms of correlation with human judgments. The metrics we consider vary in terms of representation (orthographic, phonological, semantic), directness (intrinsic vs extrinsic), granularity (e.g. word, character), and similarity computation method. The highest correlation to human judgment is achieved using transliteration followed by text normalization. We release the first corpus for human acceptance of code-switching speech recognition results in dialectal Arabic/English conversation speech.

Code-switching has become a prevalent phenomenon across many communities. It poses a challenge to NLP researchers, mainly due to the lack of available data needed for training and testing applications. In this paper, we introduce a new resource: a corpus of Egyptian- Arabic code-switch speech data that is fully tokenized, lemmatized and annotated for part-of-speech tags. Beside the corpus itself, we provide annotation guidelines to address the unique challenges of annotating code-switch data. Another challenge that we address is the fact that Egyptian Arabic orthography and grammar are not standardized.

In this paper, we present our ArzEn corpus, an Egyptian Arabic-English code-switching (CS) spontaneous speech corpus. The corpus is collected through informal interviews with 38 Egyptian bilingual university students and employees held in a soundproof room. A total of 12 hours are recorded, transcribed, validated and sentence segmented. The corpus is mainly designed to be used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, however, it also provides a useful resource for analyzing the CS phenomenon from linguistic, sociological, and psychological perspectives. In this paper, we first discuss the CS phenomenon in Egypt and the factors that gave rise to the current language. We then provide a detailed description on how the corpus was collected, giving an overview on the participants involved. We also present statistics on the CS involved in the corpus, as well as a summary to the effort exerted in the corpus development, in terms of number of hours required for transcription, validation, segmentation and speaker annotation. Finally, we discuss some factors contributing to the complexity of the corpus, as well as Arabic-English CS behaviour that could pose potential challenges to ASR systems.