Creating a live, public short message service corpus: the NUS SMS corpus

Short Message Service (SMS) messages are short messages sent from one person to another from their mobile phones. They represent a means of personal communication that is an important communicative artifact in our current digital era. As most existing studies have used private access to SMS corpora, comparative studies using the same raw SMS data have not been possible up to now. We describe our efforts to collect a public SMS corpus to address this problem. We use a battery of methodologies to collect the corpus, paying particular attention to privacy issues to address contributors’ concerns. Our live project collects new SMS message submissions, checks their quality, and adds valid messages. We release the resultant corpus as XML and as SQL dumps, along with monthly corpus statistics. We opportunistically collect as much metadata about the messages and their senders as possible, so as to enable different types of analyses. To date, we have collected more than 71,000 messages, focusing on English and Mandarin Chinese.