Introduction

BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank -- Discussion Forum was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and consists of Egyptian Arabic web discussion forum data with part-of-speech annotation, morphology, gloss and syntactic tree annotation.

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.

The unannotated Egyptian Arabic source data is released as BOLT Arabic Discussion Forums (LDC2018T10).

The annotations in this release follow Penn Arabic Treebank (PATB) annotation guidelines. The PATB project consists of two distinct phases: (a) part-of-speech tagging which divides the text into lexical tokens and gives relevant information about each token such as lexical category, inflectional features and a gloss; and (b) Arabic treebanking, which characterizes the constituent structures of word sequences, provides categories for each non-terminal node and identifies null elements, co-reference, traces and so on.

There are two kinds of morphological analysis synchronized in the corpus. LDC Standard Morphological Analyzer (SAMA) Version 3.1 (LDC2010L01) was used for Modern Standard Arabic tokens, and CALIMA (Columbia Arabic Language and dIalect Morphological Analyzer) was used for Egyptian-Arabic tokens.

Data

This release contains 440,448 tokens before clitics were split and 508,548 tree tokens after clitics were split for treebank annotation. The source material is web discussion forums collected by LDC from various sources.

Data is presented in a a variety of UTF-8 encoded text formats, specifically plain text, XML, tdf and Penn Treebank. See the included documentation for more information about the specific formats.