BOLT English Discussion Forums

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.