Introduction

BOLT Egyptian Arabic-English Word Alignment -- SMS/Chat Training was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and consists of 349,414 words of Egyptian Arabic and English parallel text enhanced with linguistic tags to indicate word relations.

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.

Data

This release consists of Egyptian Arabic source text message and chat conversations collected using two methods: new collection via LDC's collection platform, and donation of SMS or chat archives from BOLT collection participants. The source data is released as BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration (LDC2017T07).

The BOLT word alignment task was built on treebank annotation. Specifically, Egyptian Arabic source tree tokens were automatically extracted from tree files in LDC's BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank. Those tree files had been tagged for part-of-speech and syntactically annotated. That data was then aligned and annotated for the word alignment task.

The data profile broken down by character tokens, tree tokens and segments appears below:

Language Genre Files Words Tree/POS-tokens Segments

Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat 1367 349,414 475,665 74,814