Abstract
Introduction
BOLT English Translation Treebank - Chinese SMS/Chat was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and consists of SMS and chat text data translated from Chinese to English and annotated for part-of-speech and syntactic structure.
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.
Part-of-speech and treebank annotation conformed to Penn Treebank II style, incorporating changes to those guidelines that were developed under the GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Those changes primarily concerned the tokenization of hyphenated words, part-of-speech and tree changes necessitated by the tokenization changes, and updates to the syntactic annotation to comply with updated annotation guidelines. Supplementary guidelines for English treebanks and web text are included with this release.
Data
The source data is Chinese SMS and chat text collected by LDC between 2010 and 2013, translated into English and released in BOLT Chinese SMS/Chat Parallel Training Data (LDC2021T11). A subset of the translated text -- 194 files representing 108,385 tokens -- was selected for the treebank and annotated for word-level tokenization, part-of-speech and syntactic structure. Only the translated English text is included in the source data for this release.
The unannotated Chinese source data was released as BOLT Chinese SMS/Chat (LDC2018T15), the Chinese-English word alignment data was released as BOLT Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging -- SMS/Chat Training (LDC2019T13) and the Chinese Treebank of the Chinese data was released as part of Chinese Treebank 9.0 (LDC2016T13).
Data is presented in a variety of UTF-8 encoded text formats, specifically, plain text, XML, and Penn Treebank. See the included documentation for more information about specific formats.
(2021-12-15)