Introduction

BOLT Egyptian Arabic Co-reference -- Discussion Forum, SMS/Chat, and Conversational Telephone Speech was developed by Raytheon BBN Technologies and consists of co-reference annotation on Egyptian Arabic discussion forum (DF), SMS/Chat and conversational telephone speech (CTS).

The DARPA BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation) program developed machine translation and information retrieval for less formal genres, focusing particularly on user-generated content. The Linguistic Data Consortium (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.

Data

DF data was collected from the web using a combination of manual and automatic processes. SMS/Chat material was donated or collected via live platforms. CTS data was taken from LDC's Egyptian Arabic CALLHOME and CALLFRIEND telephone collections.

Co-reference annotation aims to fill in all of the connections between specific mentions in the text that refer to the same entities and events in the discourse context. BOLT co-reference annotation was performed on BOLT treebank annotation. It covers noun phrases (including proper nouns, nominals, pronouns and null arguments), possessives, proper noun pre-modifiers and verbs.

Annotation files are presented in UTF-8 encoded XML format.