TAJA Corpus: Linguistically Tagged Written Algerian Judeo-Arabic Corpus

Abstract

The Tagged Algerian Judeo-Arabic (TAJA) corpus is the first linguistically annotated corpus of any Judeo-Arabic dialect regardless of geography and period. The corpus is a genre-diverse collection of written Modern Algerian Judeo-Arabic texts, encompassing translations of the Bible and of liturgical texts, commentaries and original Judeo-Arabic books and journals. The TAJA corpus was manually annotated with parts-of-speech (POS) tags and detailed morphology tags. The goal of the new corpus is twofold. First, it preserves this endangered Judeo-Arabic language, expanding on previous fieldwork and going beyond the study of individual written texts. The corpus has already enabled us to make strides towards a grammar of written Algerian Judeo-Arabic. Second, this tagged corpus serves as a foundation for the development of Judeo-Arabic-specific Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, which allow automatic POS tagging and morphological annotation of large collections of yet untapped texts in Algerian Judeo-Arabic and other Judeo-Arabic varieties.