Abstract:
BOLT English Discussion Forums was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and consists of 830,440 discussion forum threads in English harvested from the Internet using a combination of manual and automatic processes.
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 material in this release represents the unannotated English source data in the discussion forum genre.
