Introduction

BOLT Egyptian Arabic PropBank and Sense -- Discussion Forum, SMS/Chat, and Conversational Telephone Speech was developed by the University of Colorado Boulder - CLEAR (Computational Language and Education Research) and consists of propbank annotation on Egyptian Arabic discussion forum (DF), SMS/Chat and conversational telephone speech (CTS) data.

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

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

Propbank annotation provides a layer of semantic annotation over treebank. In this release, it was applied to BOLT phrase structure treebank annotation and was carried out in two phases: (1) a frame file for each predicate was created, and (2) the predicate argument structure was annotated using the frame file as a reference.

Annotation files are presented as UTF-8 encoded and are in either plain text or XML formats.