The Najdi Arabic Corpus: a new corpus for an underrepresented Arabic dialect

This paper presents a new corpus for a dialect of Arabic spoken in the central region of Saudi Arabia: the Najdi Arabic Corpus. This is the first publicly available corpus for this dialect. Audio clips gathered for the purpose of compiling the NAC are of three types: 1. 15-min recordings of interviews with people telling stories about their lives, 2. recordings of varying lengths taken from YouTube, and 3. very short recordings between 2 to 7 min long taken from other social media outlets such as WhatsApp and Snapchat. The total size of the corpus is 275,134 of part-of-speech tagged tokens gathered from different regions of Najd.