Introduction
BOLT Chinese Discussion Forum Parallel Training Data was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and consists of 1,876,799 tokens of Chinese discussion forum data collected for the DARPA BOLT program along with their corresponding English translations.
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 source data in this release consists of discussion forum threads harvested from the Internet by LDC using a combination of manual and automatic processes. The full source data collection is released as BOLT Chinese Discussion Forums (LDC2016T05). Word-aligned and tagged data is released as BOLT Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging - Discussion Forum Training (LDC2016T19).
Data was manually selected for translation according to several criteria, including linguistic features and topic features. The files were then segmented into sentence units, formatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC’s BOLT translation guidelines. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control procedures on the completed translations.
All data are presented as UTF-8. The following table shows the data volume of this package:
Source Lang Genre Files Source Tokens Target Tokens
Chinese Discussion Forum 1,541 1,876,779 1,557,873
(2017-03)