CADIM

Columbia’s Arabic Dialect Modeling Group (“CADIM”) researchers in speech and natural language processing work closely with the Center for Computational Learning Systems. The Arabic language is actually a collection of dialects with important phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic differences. However, throughout the Arab world, the standard written language is the same, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), that is also used in some official spoken communication (newscasts, parliamentary debates). MSA is based on Classical Arabic and is itself not a native spoken language. This situation has important negative consequences for Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP). Because the spoken dialects are not officially written, it is costly to obtain adequate corpora needed to develop language models for ASR. Researchers at CCLS, working with CADIM, are applying the power of machine learning technology for natural language processing.

For more information about Columbia’s Arabic Dialect Modeling group, go to
http://ccls.columbia.edu/oldweb/cadim.