  Short Message Service (SMS) messages are largely sent directly 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 has 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 the valid messages, releasing the resultant corpus as XML and as SQL
dumps, along with corpus statistics, every month. We opportunistically collect
as much metadata about the messages and their sender as possible, so as to
enable different types of analyses. To date, we have collected about 60,000
messages, focusing on English and Mandarin Chinese.
