A NooJ Tunisian Dialect Translator

The elaboration of a translator system from Arabic dialect to modern standard Arabic becomes an important task in Natural Language Processing applications in the last years. In this context, we are interested in building a translator from Tunisian dialect to modern standard Arabic. In fact, Tunisian dialect is a variant of Arabic as much as it differs from modern standard Arabic. Besides, it is difficult to understand for non-Tunisian people. Intending to elaborate our translator, we study many Tunisian dialect corpora to identify and investigate different phenomena such as Tunisian dialect word morphology and also Tunisian Dialect sentences. The proposed translation method is based on a bilingual dictionary extracted from the study corpus and an elaborated set of local grammars. In addition, local grammars are transformed into finite state transducers while using new technologies of NooJ linguistic platform. To test and evaluate the designed translator, we apply it on a Tunisian dialect test corpus containing more than 18,000 words. The obtained results are ambitious.