The Arabic Generality Score: Another Dimension of Modeling Arabic Dialectness

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17347v1
• Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2025 13:06:00 GMT
• Title: The Arabic Generality Score: Another Dimension of Modeling Arabic Dialectness
• Authors: Sanad Shaban, Nizar Habash,
• Abstract summary: Arabic dialects form a diverse continuum, yet NLP models often treat them as discrete categories.<n>We propose a complementary measure: the Arabic Generality Score (AGS), which quantifies how widely a word is used across dialects.
• Score: 10.837144343838945
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Arabic dialects form a diverse continuum, yet NLP models often treat them as discrete categories. Recent work addresses this issue by modeling dialectness as a continuous variable, notably through the Arabic Level of Dialectness (ALDi). However, ALDi reduces complex variation to a single dimension. We propose a complementary measure: the Arabic Generality Score (AGS), which quantifies how widely a word is used across dialects. We introduce a pipeline that combines word alignment, etymology-aware edit distance, and smoothing to annotate a parallel corpus with word-level AGS. A regression model is then trained to predict AGS in context. Our approach outperforms strong baselines, including state-of-the-art dialect ID systems, on a multi-dialect benchmark. AGS offers a scalable, linguistically grounded way to model lexical generality, enriching representations of Arabic dialectness.

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