Towards shared datasets for normalization research

In this paper we present a Dutch and English dataset that can serve as a gold standard for evaluating text normalization approaches. With the combination of text messages, message board posts and tweets, these datasets represent a variety of user generated content. All data was manually normalized to their standard form using newly-developed guidelines. We perform automatic lexical normalization experiments on these datasets using statistical machine translation techniques. We focus on both the word and character level and find that we can improve the BLEU score with ca. 20% for both languages. In order for this user generated content data to be released publicly to the research community some issues first need to be resolved. These are discussed in closer detail by focussing on the current legislation and by investigating previous similar data collection projects. With this discussion we hope to shed some light on various difficulties researchers are facing when trying to share social media data

Normalization of Dutch user-generated content

Abstract This paper describes a phrase-based machine translation approach to normalize Dutch user-generated content (UGC). We compiled a corpus of three different social media genres (text messages, message board posts and tweets) to have a sample of this recent domain. We describe the various characteristics of this noisy text material and explain how it has been manually normalized using newly developed guidelines. For the automatic normalization task we focus on text messages, and find that a cascaded SMT system where a token-based module is followed by a translation at the character level gives the best word error rate reduction. After these initial experiments, we investigate the system's robustness on the complete domain of UGC by testing it on the other two social media genres, and find that the cascaded approach performs best on these genres as well. To our knowledge, we deliver the first proof-of-concept system for Dutch UGC normalization, which can serve as a baseline for future work

Collection of a corpus of Dutch SMS

Contains fulltext : 101552-1.pdf (author's version ) (Open Access) Contains fulltext : 101552.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 23 mei 201

Collection of a corpus of Dutch SMS

In this paper we present the first freely available corpus of Dutch text messages containing data originating from the Netherlands and Flanders. This corpus has been collected in the framework of the SoNaR project and constitutes a viable part of this 500-million-word corpus. About 53,000 text messages were collected on a large scale, based on voluntary donations. These messages will be distributed as such. In this paper we focus on the data collection processes involved and after studying the effect of media coverage we show that especially free publicity in newspapers and on social media networks results in more contributions. All SMS are provided with metadata information. Looking at the composition of the corpus, it becomes visible that a small number of people have contributed a large amount of data, in total 272 people have contributed to the corpus during three months. The number of women contributing to the corpus is larger than the number of men, but male contributors submitted larger amounts of data. This corpus will be of paramount importance for sociolinguistic research and normalisation studies