GALE Phase 3 and 4 Arabic NW Parallel Text Authors: Zhiyi Song, Gary Krug, Stephanie Strassel 1.0 Introduction This file contains documentation for GALE Phase 3 and 4 Arabic NW Parallel Text. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 3 and 4 of the DARPA GALE Program. This corpus contains Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) source text and corresponding English translations for 156,775 tokens, selected from Newswire (NW) data collected in GALE. 2.0 Package Structure This package comprises two directories: data/ The data directory is divided into the "source" directory and "translation directory. The "source" directory contains files in the source language. The "translation" directory contains the translated files. File names refer to the data source, source language and collection date, e.g. {SRC}_{LNG}_YYYYMMDD_NNNN(.fileTypeExtension) where - {SRC} is the source ID (e.g., CNN, VOA, etc.) - {LNG} is the three-letter language ID defined in the ISO639-3. ARB is Standard Arabic; CMN is Chinese, Mandarin; ENG is English. - YYYYMMDD is the data collection (publish) date. - NNNN is a four digit ID assigned to the file. File stems for source and translation file pairs are the same. Source files use the .tdf extension, while translation files use the eng.tdf extension. docs/ The docs directory contains documentation related to the release. docs/README.txt - this file docs/doc_list.txt - inventory of source and translation files with the token count for each file docs/file_list.txt - inventory of files in this release docs/GALE_Arabic_Translation_Guidelines_V2_7.pdf - translation guidelines docs/TDF_format.txt -- TDF format description 3.0 Contents This release includes 551 source-translation document pairs, comprising 156,775 words of translated data. Data is drawn from seven distinct Arabic newswire (NW) sources. The file called docs/file_list.txt contains a complete list of files in the package. The file docs/doc_list.txt contains the inventory of documents with the token count for each file. 3.1 TDF Format TDF files are tab-delimited text files containing one segment of text along with meta information about that segment. Each field in the TDF file is described in docs/TDF_format.txt. A source TDF file and its translation are the same except that the transcript in the source TDF is replaced by its English translation. 3.2 Encoding All data are encoded in UTF8. 4.0 Translation Pipeline A manual selection procedure was used to choose data appropriate for translation and distribution to GALE. Selection criteria included linguistic features (is the file in MSA) and topic features (does the file contain news, current events or human interest topics). Before files can be translated, sentence boundaries are identified. After that, files were reformatted into a human- readable translation format and were assigned to professional translators for careful translation. Translators followed LDC's GALE Translation guidelines, which describe the makeup of the translation team, the source data format, the translation data format, best practices for translating certain linguistic features (such as proper names and numbers), and quality control procedures applied to completed translations. Translators used special markup to indicate particular linguistic features, for instance partial words and typos in source text; these uses are described in the documentation accompanying this release. After translations were completed, bilingual LDC staff performed quality control by selecting a proportional sample from each delivery and scrutinizing it for several kinds of mistakes, as described in the translation guidelines. Low quality translations were returned to the translators for revision. After quality control is complete, translation files were validated and reformatted into the release format. 5.0 Sanity Checks LDC performed the following corpus-wide checks and corrected all errors found: -- Number of source segments matches number of translation segments for all files (except full source text) -- All non-blank source segments correspond to non-blank translation segments -- All translation files have a corresponding full source file selected source file, and index file -- All files contain only UTF-8 encoded characters, although they may contain non-ascii characters such as Western European characters -- Punctuation in translations is ASCII punctuation 6.0 Acknowledgement This work was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, GALE Program Grant No. HR0011-06-1-0003. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred. 7.0 Content Copyright Portions © 2008 Agence France Presse, © 2007-2008 Al Ahram, © 2007-2008 Al Hayat, © 2007-2008 Al-Quds Al-Arabi, © 2007-2008 An Nahar, © 2007-2008 Asharq Al-Awsat, © 2007 Assabah, © 2007, 2008, 2015 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania ---- README Created 29 June, 2011 Gary Krug Updated 31 January, 2011 Zhiyi Song Updated 30 April, 2012 Zhiyi Song