Introduction

BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat Parallel Training Data was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and consists of approximately 723,000 tokens of Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat data collected for the DARPA BOLT program along with their corresponding English translations.

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

The source 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 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.

Data was manually selected for translation. Messages/conversations were arranged in chronological order, segmented into sentence units (all or portions of message threads depending on their length), and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC's BOLT translation guidelines.

Source and translation files are presented in UTF-8 encoded XML format.