- Arfath Pasha, Mohamed Al-Badrashiny, Mohamed Altantawy, Nizar Habash, Manoj Pooleery, Owen Rambow, Ryan Roth, Mona T. Diab. 2013. DIRA: Dialectal Arabic Information Retrieval Assistant. Abstract: DIRA is a query expansion tool that generates search terms in Standard Arabic and/or its dialects when provided with queries in English or Standard Arabic. The retrieval of dialectal Arabic text has recently become necessary due to the increase of dialectal content on social media. DIRA addresses the challenges of retrieving information in Arabic dialects, which have significant linguistic differences from Standard Arabic. To our knowledge, DIRA is the only tool in existence that automatically generates dialect search terms with relevant morphological variations from English or Standard Arabic query terms.
