Tarab: A Multi-Dialect Corpus of Arabic Lyrics and Poetry

TL;DR

The Tarab Corpus is the largest open Arabic dataset of lyrics and poetry, covering multiple dialects, eras, and styles, enabling diverse linguistic and cultural analyses.

Contribution

This paper introduces the Tarab Corpus, a comprehensive, multi-dialect Arabic linguistic resource combining classical and modern texts with detailed metadata.

Findings

Baseline analyses for dialect identification

Genre differentiation results

Dataset's potential for linguistic research

Abstract

We introduce the Tarab Corpus, a large-scale cultural and linguistic resource that brings together Arabic song lyrics and poetry within a unified analytical framework. The corpus comprises 2.56 million verses and more than 13.5 million tokens, making it, to our knowledge, the largest open Arabic corpus of creative text spanning both classical and contemporary production. Tarab is broadly balanced between songs and poems and covers Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and six major regional varieties: Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine, Iraqi, Sudanese, and Maghrebi Arabic. The artists and poets represented in the corpus are associated with 28 modern nation states and multiple historical eras, covering over fourteen centuries of Arabic creative expression from the Pre-Islamic period to the twenty-first century. Each verse is accompanied by structured metadata describing linguistic variety, geographic origin, and historical or cultural context, enabling comparative linguistic, stylistic, and diachronic analysis across genres and time. We describe the data collection, normalisation, and validation pipeline and present baseline analyses for variety identification and genre differentiation. The dataset is publicly available on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/datasets/drelhaj/Tarab.