Challenges and Progress in Constructing Arabic Dialect Corpora and Linguistic tools: A Focus on Moroccan and Tunisian Dialects

Given the lack of resources for Arabic dialects, the construction of corpora, lexical resources, and tools is a non-trivial challenge. The focus of the article is to describe our in-progress work to address these deficiencies. We start with Moroccan and Tunisian dialects to provide annotated corpora and corpus-based lexical resources. We also aim to extend an existing morphological engine with linguistic resources built \emph{ad hoc} for each dialect. In addition, we develop an integrated component in the morphological engine to better address linguistic and sociolinguistic characteristics while preserving the integrity of dialectal texts.