  This article describes the constitution process of the first
morpho-syntactically annotated Tunisian Arabish Corpus (TArC). Arabish, also
known as Arabizi, is a spontaneous coding of Arabic dialects in Latin
characters and arithmographs (numbers used as letters). This code-system was
developed by Arabic-speaking users of social media in order to facilitate the
writing in the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and text messaging
informal frameworks. There is variety in the realization of Arabish amongst
dialects, and each Arabish code-system is under-resourced, in the same way as
most of the Arabic dialects. In the last few years, the focus on Arabic
dialects in the NLP field has considerably increased. Taking this into
consideration, TArC will be a useful support for different types of analyses,
computational and linguistic, as well as for NLP tools training. In this
article we will describe preliminary work on the TArC semi-automatic
construction process and some of the first analyses we developed on TArC. In
addition, in order to provide a complete overview of the challenges faced
during the building process, we will present the main Tunisian dialect
characteristics and their encoding in Tunisian Arabish.
