Ahmed Abdelali, Steve Helmreich and I just submitted a paper to CAASL3: Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages to be held in Ottawa on August 26th. It reports on work we have done on geographical classification of Arabic text. We presented a paper on this topic at the Chicago Colloquia on Digital Humanities and Computer Science back in November 2008 (Linguistic Dumpster Diving: Geographical Classification of Arabic Text – pdf). At that colloqiua a number of people gave us good suggestions and criticisms. Our work since then has included investigating the suggestions these people made and also addressing the criticisms. For example, one individual suggested we look at non-linear methods of classification. Continue reading