BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank - SMS/Chat (LDC2021T17)

Introduction

BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank - SMS/Chat was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and consists of Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat data with part-of-speech annotation, morphology, and syntactic tree annotation.

The DARPA BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation) program developed machine translation and information retrieval for less formal genres, focusing particularly on user-generated content. LDC supported the BOLT program by collecting informal data sources -- discussion forums, text messaging and chat -- in Chinese, Egyptian Arabic and English. The collected data was translated and annotated for various tasks including word alignment, treebanking, propbanking and co-reference.

The unannotated Egyptian Arabic source data is released as BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration (LDC2017T07).

The annotations in this release follow Penn Arabic Treebank (PATB) annotation guidelines. The PATB project consists of two distinct phases: (a) part-of-speech tagging which divides the text into lexical tokens and gives relevant information about each token such as lexical category, inflectional features and a gloss; and (b) Arabic treebanking, which characterizes the constituent structures of word sequences, provides categories for each non-terminal node and identifies null elements, co-reference, traces and so on.

There are two types of morphological analysis synchronized in the corpus. LDC Standard Morphological Analyzer (SAMA) Version 3.1 ( LDC2010L01) was used for Modern Standard Arabic tokens, and CALIMA (Columbia Arabic Language and dIalect Morphological Analyzer) was used for Egyptian-Arabic tokens.

Data

This release contains 349,414 tokens before clitics were split and 435,677 tree tokens after clitics were split for treebank annotation. The source data was collected by LDC from its collection platform or by donation and was manually reviewed to exclude material not in the target language or with sensitive content. Originally written in Arabizi (or Romanized/Latin characters) script, the source data was transliterated to Arabic script and manually corrected prior to treebank annotation.

Data is presented in a variety of UTF-8 encoded text formats, specifically plain text, XML, tdf and Penn Treebank. See the included documentation for more information about the specific formats.