@article{,
title= {BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration - LDC2017T07},
journal= {},
author= {Song Chen and Dana Fore and Stephanie Strassel and Haejoong Lee and Jonathan Wright},
year= {2017},
url= {https://doi.org/10.35111/hbvp-8v54},
doi= {10.35111/hbvp-8v54},
abstract= {# BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration

| **Item Name:** | BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration |
|---|---|
| **Author(s):** | Song Chen, Dana Fore, Stephanie Strassel, Haejoong Lee, Jonathan Wright |
| **LDC Catalog No.:** | LDC2017T07 |
| **ISBN:** | 1-58563-797-1 |
| **ISLRN:** | 573-046-449-233-0 |
| **DOI:** | https://doi.org/10.35111/hbvp-8v54 |
| **Release Date:** | April 17, 2017 |
| **Member Year(s):** | 2017 |
| **DCMI Type(s):** | Text |
| **Data Source(s):** | text chat conversations |
| **Project(s):** | BOLT |
| **Application(s):** | machine translation |
| **Language(s):** | Egyptian Arabic, Arabic |
| **Language ID(s):** | arz, ara |
| **Citation:** | Chen, Song, et al. BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration LDC2017T07. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2017. |

## 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](https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/collaborations/current-projects/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.

## Acknowledgement

This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No. HR0011-11-C-0145.
The content does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of
the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.
},
keywords= {nlp, english, Arabic, egyptian arabic, egyptian, BOLT, SMS, Text Corpus, Machine Translation, Transliteration},
terms= {},
license= {},
superseded= {}
}