A Large-Scale Comparison of Historical Text Normalization Systems

There is no consensus on the state-of-the-art approach to historical text normalization. Many techniques have been proposed, including rule-based methods, distance metrics, character-based statistical machine translation, and neural encoder--decoder models, but studies have used different datasets, different evaluation methods, and have come to different conclusions. This paper presents the largest study of historical text normalization done so far. We critically survey the existing literature and report experiments on eight languages, comparing systems spanning all categories of proposed normalization techniques, analysing the effect of training data quantity, and using different evaluation methods. The datasets and scripts are made publicly available.Comment: Accepted at NAACL 201

Learning to Read by Spelling: Towards Unsupervised Text Recognition

This work presents a method for visual text recognition without using any paired supervisory data. We formulate the text recognition task as one of aligning the conditional distribution of strings predicted from given text images, with lexically valid strings sampled from target corpora. This enables fully automated, and unsupervised learning from just line-level text-images, and unpaired text-string samples, obviating the need for large aligned datasets. We present detailed analysis for various aspects of the proposed method, namely - (1) impact of the length of training sequences on convergence, (2) relation between character frequencies and the order in which they are learnt, (3) generalisation ability of our recognition network to inputs of arbitrary lengths, and (4) impact of varying the text corpus on recognition accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate excellent text recognition accuracy on both synthetically generated text images, and scanned images of real printed books, using no labelled training examples

Noise or music? Investigating the usefulness of normalisation for robust sentiment analysis on social media data

In the past decade, sentiment analysis research has thrived, especially on social media. While this data genre is suitable to extract opinions and sentiment, it is known to be noisy. Complex normalisation methods have been developed to transform noisy text into its standard form, but their effect on tasks like sentiment analysis remains underinvestigated. Sentiment analysis approaches mostly include spell checking or rule-based normalisation as preprocess- ing and rarely investigate its impact on the task performance. We present an optimised sentiment classifier and investigate to what extent its performance can be enhanced by integrating SMT-based normalisation as preprocessing. Experiments on a test set comprising a variety of user-generated content genres revealed that normalisation improves sentiment classification performance on tweets and blog posts, showing the model’s ability to generalise to other data genres

An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German

Syntactically annotated corpora are highly important for enabling large-scale diachronic and diatopic language research. Such corpora have recently been developed for a variety of historical languages, or are still under development. One of those under development is the fully tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which is aimed at facilitating research into the highly under-researched diachronic syntax of Low German. The present paper reports on a crucial step in creating the corpus, viz. the creation of a part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German (MLG). Having been transmitted in several non-standardised written varieties, MLG poses a challenge to standard POS taggers, which usually rely on normalized spelling. We outline the major issues faced in the creation of the tagger and present our solutions to them

Tracking COVID-19 using online search

Previous research has demonstrated that various properties of infectious diseases can be inferred from online search behaviour. In this work we use time series of online search query frequencies to gain insights about the prevalence of COVID-19 in multiple countries. We first develop unsupervised modelling techniques based on associated symptom categories identified by the United Kingdom's National Health Service and Public Health England. We then attempt to minimise an expected bias in these signals caused by public interest -- as opposed to infections -- using the proportion of news media coverage devoted to COVID-19 as a proxy indicator. Our analysis indicates that models based on online searches precede the reported confirmed cases and deaths by 16.7 (10.2 - 23.2) and 22.1 (17.4 - 26.9) days, respectively. We also investigate transfer learning techniques for mapping supervised models from countries where the spread of disease has progressed extensively to countries that are in earlier phases of their respective epidemic curves. Furthermore, we compare time series of online search activity against confirmed COVID-19 cases or deaths jointly across multiple countries, uncovering interesting querying patterns, including the finding that rarer symptoms are better predictors than common ones. Finally, we show that web searches improve the short-term forecasting accuracy of autoregressive models for COVID-19 deaths. Our work provides evidence that online search data can be used to develop complementary public health surveillance methods to help inform the COVID-19 response in conjunction with more established approaches.Comment: Published in Nature Digital Medicine. Please note that the published version differs from this preprin

Text Normalisation of Dialectal Finnish

Tekstin normalisointi on prosessi, jossa epästandardia kirjoitettua kieltä muutetaan standardisoituun muotoon. Murteet ovat yksi esimerkki epästandardista kielestä, joka voi poiketa huomattavastikin standardisoidusta yleiskielestä. Lisäksi suomen kieli on ortografialtaan varsin pitkälti foneemista, minkä ansiosta myös puhutun kielen ominaispiirteet on mahdollista tuoda esille kirjoitetussa muodossa. Etenkin epävirallisilla alustoilla ja arkikielisessä kontekstissa, kuten sosiaalisessa mediassa, suomen kielen puhujat saattavat kirjoittaa sanat kuten ääntäisivät ne normaalisti puhuessaan. Tällaista epästandardista kielestä koostuvaa aineistoa voi löytää myös luonnollisen kielen käsittelyn tarpeisiin esimerkiksi Twitteristä. Perinteiselle yleiskieliselle tekstiaineistolle suunnatut luonnollisen kielen käsittelyn työkalut eivät kuitenkaan välttämättä saavuta toivottavia tuloksia puhekieliselle aineistolle sovellettuna, jolloin ratkaisuna voidaan käyttää välivaiheena tekstin normalisointia. Normalisointiprosessissa syötteenä käytettävä puhekielinen tai muutoin epästandardia kieltä sisältävä teksti muutetaan standardisoituun kirjoitusasuun, jota luonnollisen kielen käsittelyn työkalut paremmin ymmärtävät. Tämä työ pohjaa aiempaan tutkimukseen, jota on tehty suomen murteiden normalisoinnin parissa. Aiemmissa tutkimuksissa on todettu, että merkkipohjaiset BRNN-neuroverkkomallit (Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Nerwork) saavuttavat hyviä tuloksia suomen kielen murteiden normalisoinnissa, kun syötteenä käytetään sanoja kolmen kappaleen lohkoissa. Tämä tarkoittaa, että järjestelmä saa syötteenä kerrallaan kolmen sanan joukon, ja jokainen sana on edelleen pilkottu välilyönnein eroteltuihin kirjoitusmerkkeihin. Tässä työssä pyrittiin käyttämään samoja metodeja ja aineistoa kuin aiemmassa tutkimuksessa, jotta tulokset olisivat vertailukelpoisia. Aineistona on käytetty Kotimaisten kielten keskuksen ylläpitämää Suomen kielen näytteitä -korpusta, ja normalisointiin on käytetty OpenNMT-nimistä avoimen lähdekoodin kirjastoa. Työssä toteutetuista kokeiluista saadut tulokset näyttävät vahvistavan aiempien tutkimustulosten pohjalta tehdyt löydökset, mutta lisäksi on viitteitä siitä, että neuroverkkomallit saattaisivat pidemmistä lohkoista koostuvista syötteistä. BRNN-mallin lisäksi työssä kokeillaan myös muita neuroverkkoarkkitehtuureja, mutta vertailtaessa sanavirheiden suhdelukua mittaavaa WER-arvoa (Word Error Rate) voidaan todeta, että BRNN-malli suoriutuu normalisointitehtävästä muita neuroverkkoarkkitehtuureja paremmin

Basic tasks of sentiment analysis

Subjectivity detection is the task of identifying objective and subjective sentences. Objective sentences are those which do not exhibit any sentiment. So, it is desired for a sentiment analysis engine to find and separate the objective sentences for further analysis, e.g., polarity detection. In subjective sentences, opinions can often be expressed on one or multiple topics. Aspect extraction is a subtask of sentiment analysis that consists in identifying opinion targets in opinionated text, i.e., in detecting the specific aspects of a product or service the opinion holder is either praising or complaining about