Introduction

BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and consists of naturally-occurring Short Message Service (SMS) and Chat (CHT) data collected through data donations and live collection involving native speakers of Egyptian Arabic. The corpus contains 5,691 conversations totaling 1,029,248 words across 262,026 messages. Messages were natively written in either Arabic orthography or romanized Arabizi. A total of 1,856 Arabizi conversations (287,022 words) were transliterated from the original romanized Arabizi script into standard Arabic orthography.

The 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

The data in this release was collected using two methods: new collection via LDC's collection platform, and donation of SMS or chat archives from BOLT collection participants. All data collected were reviewed manually to exclude any messages/conversations that were not in the target language or that had sensitive content, such as personal identifying information (PII).

A portion of the source conversations containing Arabizi tokens were automatically transliterated into Arabic script. Once the Arabizi source was transliterated into Arabic script automatically, LDC annotators reviewed, corrected and normalized the transliteration according to "Conventional Orthography for Dialectal Arabic" (CODA). All data is presented in XML.