AI + NLP · curated corpora, papers & tools for low-resource Moroccan Arabic (Darija)
# AI + NLP · darija-nlp-resources
> Curated list of public corpora, papers, tools, and benchmarks for Moroccan Arabic (Darija) NLP — the operating language behind jak.ma.
---
## Why this list
Moroccan Arabic (Darija) is the operating language of ~37 million people but is severely under-resourced in mainstream NLP infrastructure. Most "Arabic NLP" work targets Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which Moroccan users do not actually use for service-discovery, day-to-day messaging, or marketplace transactions.
This repo is the curated reading + tooling list I built while shipping jak.ma — a live Moroccan marketplace running grounded retrieval in Darija. If you're starting a Darija NLP project, start here.
---
## Public corpora
**Full annotated list — per-entry sizes, licenses, caveats, and a "what to use it for in production" note: corpora.md.**
### Curated multi-dialect Arabic corpora that include Darija
- **PADIC** (Parallel Arabic Dialect Corpus) — multi-dialect Arabic including Maghrebi varieties. Useful for cross-dialect alignment.
- **MADAR** (Multi-Arabic Dialect Applications and Resources) — 25 city-level Arabic dialects across 25 Arab cities. Includes Rabat, Casablanca, Fes for Morocco.
- **OSACT** (Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools) — repeating shared task with Arabic dialect tracks.
- **TUNIZI** — Tunisian Latin-script Arabic. Code-switching patterns transfer to Darija Arabizi.
### Darija-specific projects
- **DODa** (Darija Open Dataset) — community-curated Darija dictionary mapping to MSA + English.
- **MADAR-26** — Rabat + Casablanca + Fes subsets, sentence-level transliteration.
- **Maghrebi-Arabic-NLP** — community resource list for Maghreb dialects (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco).
### Script-mixed (Arabizi) corpora
Latin-script Darija ("Arabizi") is ~30% of jak.ma's user-generated text. Resources are sparser:
- Twitter-mined Arabizi datasets (search arxiv for "Arabizi" + year)
- Tunisian Arabizi corpora (TUNIZI) — closest analog
- …