README.md

---
language:
- ar
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
task_categories:
- text-classification
pretty_name: DialSeg-Ar
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
tags:
- linear_text_segmentation
configs:
- config_name: default
  data_files:
  - split: eval
    path: data/eval-*
dataset_info:
  features:
  - name: subset
    dtype: string
  - name: arabic_dialect
    dtype: string
  - name: genre
    dtype: string
  - name: file_name
    dtype: string
  - name: lines
    dtype: string
  - name: segmentation
    dtype: string
  splits:
  - name: eval
    num_bytes: 6781199
    num_examples: 1010
  download_size: 1975170
  dataset_size: 6781199
---

# DialSeg-Ar

## Dataset Summary

**DialSeg-Ar** is a multi-genre benchmark for **linear semantic segmentation** in Arabic, with a focus on **dialectal conversational and transcribed speech**. The dataset is designed to evaluate how well models can split a sequence of utterances into **contiguous topic-coherent segments**.

The benchmark covers diverse and underrepresented Arabic genres, including:

- dialectal telephone conversations
- code-switched Gulf Arabic–English podcasts
- dialectal emotional dialogue from novels
- Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) news commentary

DialSeg-Ar is intended for research on:

- linear text segmentation
- discourse analysis
- conversational structure modeling
- segmentation for retrieval, summarization, and downstream discourse tasks
- low-resource and dialectal Arabic NLP

This dataset was introduced in:

**Chirkunov, K., Samih, Y., Freihat, A. A., & Aldarmaki, H. (2026). Linear Semantic Segmentation for Low-Resource Spoken Dialects. In Proceedings of ACL 2026.**

---

## Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

DialSeg-Ar supports the task of **linear semantic segmentation**, also known as **linear text segmentation**.

Given an ordered sequence of utterances, the goal is to predict the positions where a new topic segment begins.

Typical evaluation metrics include:

- Boundary F1
- Pk
- WindowDiff

---

## Languages

The dataset primarily contains **Arabic**, including:

- Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)
- Moroccan Arabic
- Gulf Arabic
- Levantine Arabic
- Iraqi Arabic

Some subsets also include **English code-switching**, especially in the podcast portion.

---

## Dataset Structure

Each row corresponds to one JSONL filename and contains:

- `subset` (`string`): subset name (for example `ldc_gulf`, `mgb-5`, `rewayat`).
- `arabic_dialect` (`string`): language label.
- `genre` (`string`): genre label (for example `phone conversations, spontaneous speech`, `shows, drama`).
- `file_name` (`string`): matched JSONL file name.
- `lines` (`string`): input text content in jsonl format.
- `segmentation` (`string`): text segments in jsonl format.