TweetNorm: a benchmark for lexical normalization of spanish tweets

The language used in social media is often characterized by the abundance of informal and non-standard writing. The normalization of this non-standard language can be crucial to facilitate the subsequent textual processing and to consequently help boost the performance of natural language processing...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Alegria, Iñaki, Aranberri, Nora, Comas Umbert, Pere Ramon, Fresno, Víctor, Gamallo, Pablo, Padró, Lluís|||0000-0003-4738-5019, San Vicente Roncal, Iñaki, Turmo Borras, Jorge|||0000-0002-7521-1115, Zubiaga, Arkaitz
Format: article
Publication Date:2015
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repository:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/80964
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/80964
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10579-015-9315-6
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Standard language
Social media
Twitter
Lexical normalization
Corpus
Evaluation
Lexicografia
Normalització lingüística
Mitjans de comunicació social
Description
Summary:The language used in social media is often characterized by the abundance of informal and non-standard writing. The normalization of this non-standard language can be crucial to facilitate the subsequent textual processing and to consequently help boost the performance of natural language processing tools applied to social media text. In this paper we present a benchmark for lexical normalization of social media posts, specifically for tweets in Spanish language. We describe the tweet normalization challenge we organized recently, analyze the performance achieved by the different systems submitted to the challenge, and delve into the characteristics of systems to identify the features that were useful. The organization of this challenge has led to the production of a benchmark for lexical normalization of social media, including an evaluation framework, as well as an annotated corpus of Spanish tweets-TweetNorm_es-, which we make publicly available. The creation of this benchmark and the evaluation has brought to light the types of words that submitted systems did best with, and posits the main shortcomings to be addressed in future work.