*Introduction* BOLT English Treebank - Discussion Forum was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and consists of English web discussion forum data with part-of-speech and syntactic structure annotations. 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 unannotated English source data is released as BOLT English Discussion Forums (LDC2017T11). 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 English discussion forum web text collected by LDC in 2011 and 2012. A subset of that collection -- 702 files representing 268,907 tokens -- was selected for the treebank and annotated for word-level tokenization, part-of-speech and syntactic structure. Data is presented in a 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. *Acknowledgement* This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No. HR0011-11-C-0145. The content does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.

Creator(s)

Ann Bies

Seth Kulick

Justin Mott

Colin Warner

Distributor(s)

Linguistic Data Consortium

Right Holder(s)

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