LDC Arabic English Newswire Translation Collection

The Arabic English Newswire Translation Collection consists of approximately 550,000 words of Arabic newswire text and its English translation from Agence France Presse (France), An Nahar (Lebanon) and Assabah (Tunisia). The source Arabic text was used in LDC's Arabic Treebank, specifically, in Part 1 (Part 1 v. 2.0;Part 1 v. 3.0), Part 

3 (Part 3 v. 1.0; Part 3 v. 2.0) and Part 4 (Part 4 v. 1.0). A subset of Agence France Presse (AFP) source text from Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v. 2.0 was previously translated and released by LDC in Arabic Treebank: Part 1 - 10K word English Translation, LDC2003T07. The English translations in this corpus were provided by translation agencies using LDC's Arabic Translation Guidelines.

The original source files used different encodings for the Arabic characters, including UTF8 and ASMO. SGML tags were used for marking sentence and paragraph boundaries and for annotating other information about each story. All Arabic source data was converted to UTF and most SGML tags were removed or replaced by "plain text" markers.